By Aubrey Whelan
The Philadelphia Inquirer
PHILADELPHIA — Penn Presbyterian Medical Center has metal detectors installed at hospital entrances and equipped frontline staffers with wearable buttons to immediately call security officers when they’re in danger.
The University City hospital, home to Penn Medicine’s main trauma center, has instituted more safety measures in recent years to address an increasing national problem: assaults against healthcare workers.
Staff are regularly trained to de-escalate conflicts. Security officers are posted at emergency room drop-offs around the clock and pat down patients for weapons at the ED door.
It still wasn’t enough to protect three nurses on Saturday morning, when a car rushed up to the emergency department with a gunshot victim inside. As the nurses rushed to pull the man from the car, a Penn police cruiser pulled up with sirens blaring and lights flashing. The driver sped off — hitting the nurses and the victim in the process.
The hit-and-run shocked health-care workers across the Philadelphia region, and prompted Penn to institute yet another layer of security policies around patient drop-offs at Presbyterian. Amid a rising tide of violence against healthcare workers nationally, hospital officials and employees around the city say more must be done by policymakers outside hospital walls to protect their safety.
“We can provide all we have provided, and things like this still happen,” said Lisa Triantos, Presbyterian’s clinical director of emergency and medical nursing, who has worked for years to institute safety protocols at the hospital. “That keeps me up at night.”
Security measures in place at Presbyterian
Immediately after the hit-and-run, Presbyterian started requiring anyone dropping someone off at the emergency room to turn their car off and step out of the driver’s seat before nurses extricated a victim from the car.
Being struck by a car is not the only risk that nurses face responding to “scoop and runs,” as first responders call it when Philadelphia police who encounter a gunshot victim drive them immediately to the hospital instead of waiting for an ambulance. By saving time, this measure saves lives, studies show, but hospital staff can be injured if they don’t properly lift a patient from the car.
The hospital, like many in the city, has long had procedures to protect nurses from injuring themselves in the heavy lifting involved.
Other security measures have reduced the threat of people taking weapons inside the hospital, said Yaya Diakite, Presbyterian’s security director. As word spread about Presbyterian’s metal detectors and pat-down policies, fewer people bring guns to the hospital, though security officers still find about 25 a month at the ED entrance and about 20 to 30 a month hospital-wide, he said.
Hospital officials say these measures have done much to keep employees safe: Presbyterian had the lowest number of reported staff-involved assaults of any major trauma centers in Philadelphia between January 2022 and December 2023, according to an Inquirer analysis.
“One of the reasons that we have a lower incidence of physical violence than other hospitals is that this organization has made a commitment to try and protect the staff as much as we possibly can,” said Bob Russel, Presbyterian’s CEO. “You have to feel safe if you’re going to provide care to patients.”
‘We cannot stand by’
Assaults against healthcare workers have risen nationally in recent years. In a survey of 500 emergency nurses conducted by the Emergency Nurses Association in 2024, 56% said they’d been verbally assaulted, threatened with violence, or physically assaulted in the last month.
Healthcare workers around the city have reported rising incidences of violence, physical and verbal, that contribute to burnout and stress. Paramedics have also reported verbal and physical abuse.
On Thursday, a Philadelphia fire department paramedic was in critical condition after a patient stabbed him twice in an ambulance.
“As workplace violence worsens, where is the line drawn between tolerating mistreatment and protecting our safety? Many of us have brushed off verbal attacks, and perhaps even the physical ones, but now we cannot stand by as our colleagues are being struck by cars,” a nurse and a doctor who work at Penn wrote in an Inquirer expert opinion piece, calling for new laws in the aftermath of the hit-and-run.
Violence like the hit-and-run at Presbyterian is a concern nurses around the city grapple with, said Rebecca Murphy, the president of the nurses’ union at St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children.
“Pretty much anyone I know that I work with was able to imagine that happening to one of us, because that’s literally the environment we work in,” said Murphy, an emergency room nurse speaking in her capacity as a representative of the union.
Though St. Christopher’s is a children’s hospital, its trauma center accepts anyone who needs medical help. Frequently, its emergency room treats adult patients suffering from gunshot wounds brought there in a private car simply because it was the closest hospital.
Murphy said she and her colleagues have dealt with verbal and physical abuse from families and patients. Nurses understand the stressful nature of a hospital setting but also want better legal protections against assault.
“We can’t do our job if we’re trapped in a room and being threatened,” Murphy said.
Calls for lawmakers to protect health-care workers
Penn officials and PASNAP leaders are advocating for the passage of a law that would make it a federal crime to assault a healthcare worker and direct funding to hospitals for improved security measures.
In recent years, hospitals have seen that some assault charges brought by staff never make it out of a courtroom.
Penn Presbyterian administrators have worked to support nurses who do decide to bring charges against patients or hospital visitors, but some ultimately decide not to because of the stress of appearing in court or the uncertainty a charge will be upheld. And judges may throw out cases for reasons that health-care workers dispute, said Russell.
“We’ve had Common Pleas Court judges in the last few years dismiss cases of assault because the patient was having a bad day,” Russell said.
At Presbyterian, staff are working to support the nurses injured in the hit-and-run and dealing with their own grief over the incident, Hoke said. When Triantos called Hoke with the news around 4 a.m. Saturday, she was so distraught that Hoke initially assumed she’d had a family emergency.
On the night of the crash, Hoke said, her first thought was to get to the hospital as quickly as she could to be there for the injured nurses — and the hospital staff about to take on the emotional toll of caring for their own colleagues.
And, she added: “We had a very full ED that night. I knew there were other patients to care for.”
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