Allina Health is facing more than $83,000 in proposed fines related to nurses who were hurt by workplace violence at Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis over the past year.
Allina faces fines over hospital nurses hurt by violence
State labor department proposes more than $83,000 in fines related to 16 incidents, but Allina has appealed them.
The Minnesota Star Tribune
December 5, 2024 at 3:38PM
The fines by the Minnesota Department of Labor and Industry have not been made public while Allina contests them, but they were disclosed Tuesday by the Minnesota Nurses Association, the union representing registered nurses in most Twin Cities hospitals.
Nurses are being asked to take on more patients at once, especially at night, which is allowing more incidents to erupt, said Andrew Dunn, a union representative for Abbott nurses. “When there’s less staff to address an emergency concern, relating to mental health or violence, it means there is slower response times and it means existing assaults get more serious.”
The union highlighted the fines as it sets its lobbying agenda for the 2025 session of the Minnesota Legislature and begins negotiations with hospitals in the Twin Cities and Duluth over new three-year contracts for their nurses. Workplace safety is a top issue for nurses; a 2023 union survey found 45% of its members had experienced physical violence or abuse at the bedside at some point in their careers.
Allina on Nov. 27 contested all the citations that were classified as serious, and noted in a statement that seven were related to one patient. The health care provider offers violence prevention training to nurses.
“Hospitals throughout the country are experiencing the troubling trend of increased violent events,” the statement said. “Allina Health takes significant precautions to mitigate violence to ensure the safety and well-being of our care team members while providing care to those who need it.”
According to documents released by the union, the state labor investigation found 15 serious incidents at Abbott Northwestern and levied fines ranging from $4,000 to $7,200 for each one. The citations don’t specify what happened in each incident, other than that there was an “absence of an effective workplace violence prevention program” when they occurred.
Allina endured a high-profile incident of violence at its Buffalo clinic in 2021, when a patient walked into the waiting room with a gun and shot five people, killing one of them. But the rise in violence has more to do with patients in ER bays or hospital beds who become agitated and lash out. Delirium and confusion are common problems that lead to violence, often when patients are recovering from drug overdoses or emerging from sedation.
“Punches, kicking, hair pulled out, feces thrown at them. Nurses have gotten concussions from patients,” Dunn said. “They can be really brutal attacks.”
All 15 of the citations involved nurses who were hurt by workplace violence on the job, Dunn said, but the state investigation at Abbott was broader, and started with a complaint from a security guard who suffered a violence-related injury.
About 630 employees of Minnesota’s nonprofit and private hospitals missed work from 2021 through 2022 to recover from violence-related injuries, according to the most recent estimates by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That compares with 200 a decade earlier. The union said the rate of violence-related injuries has surged much higher this year at Abbott, the third-largest hospital in Minnesota and Allina’s flagship facility.
“It’s definitely getting worse,” said Jen Stanerson, an emergency room nurse at Abbott and a union leader at the hospital.
Minnesota’s adverse event reporting system similarly has documented an increase, including 16 incidents last year in which patients or workers were seriously injured by physical assaults. The state hadn’t reported more than seven incidents in any year prior to 2022.
Hospitals have pursued a variety of solutions. Security officials at Allina tested an alternative form of pepper spray to try to quell violent incidents.
Nurses pursued legislation in 2023 to reduce risks by creating statewide staffing ratios, but that language got stripped out of a bill at the last moment as lawmakers negotiated an end to the session.
Stanerson said Minnesota’s nursing shortage will worsen without solutions: “People are leaving because it’s so unsafe.”
Expert advice on masking, testing, vaccines and boosters is evolving along with coronavirus variants. Here’s the latest from Minnesota and the CDC.
