The Health Service Executive does not have centralised statistics for assaults on healthcare staff, it has acknowledged.
A spokesperson for the HSE said these type of figures are collated and held by individual hospitals, but the statistics are not collated in national figures. The spokesperson added that it is difficult to collect the figures for assaults on healthcare staff and give statistics for Ireland as a whole, because each institution has different measurement standards for assaults on its medical personnel.
Irish Medical Times had asked if the HSE had figures for physical and verbal assaults on healthcare workers in 2006 and 2007. The HSE was also asked how many of these were on hospital doctors and GPs, and what actions were being taken to prevent assaults and prosecute offenders.
Figures recently released by officials in Northern Ireland showed that there were over 5,500 physical or verbal assaults on healthcare workers there in 2006. Last month an Emergency Medicine consultant in Derry’s Altnagelvin Hospital, Dr Alan McKinney, said that institution’s legal team is prepared to take action against people who assault staff.
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