After the stabbing attack on a doctor at the NWRH on Easter Sunday, violence against health workers is something that everyone needs to take seriously and act on immediately.

That’s why we met with the Premier Jeremy Rockliff, the Secretary of Health Kathryn Morgan-Wicks and other senior managers in health to talk about hospital security.

Unfortunately, this attack probably wasn’t a surprise for a lot of you given the many near misses we’ve heard about for years, and we’ve been telling the government for a long time that hospital security needs to change.

But we do believe that by working together with the government we can make sure every worker gets home safe from work every day – and as your union we’ll always fight for your safety.  

At our meeting we also let them know that workers at the NWRH have been telling us there were several issues at the time of the attack, including a lack of support for attendants (also called medical orderlies in other hospitals) who secured the hospital after the incident.

We know outsourcing hospital security doesn’t work. We need to employ security directly that forms a coordinated, team response to make hospitals safer for patients and workers.

To their credit, the Premier and senior managers did listen to our concerns and sounded like they also wanted to get a plan in place to tackle these issues.

We talked about putting together a plan like the Victorian ‘10-Point Plan’ which aims to end violence and aggression against health workers. The 10-Point Plan is a measure workers and unions like HACSU have been advocating for too long, and we think something similar in Tasmania would go a long way to helping you.

The government and health management have agreed to establish a working party that will meet in the next two weeks, and we’re keen to directly involve HACSU members across the state in this process.

To find real fixes to this issue and put in place safety measures that protect you, we need to hear from the workers who deal with these issues on regular basis. So, please get in touch if you’d like more information or want to get involved in fixing this together.

We’ll keep you up to date as things progress, but if you have any questions or want to chat more about this issue, please give us a call via HACSUassist on 1300 880 032.