Preventing Workplace Violence

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. COURTNEY. Mr. Speaker, as we begin the second year of the 118th Congress, a Congress which unfortunately in its first year was one of the lowest and least productive Congresses in memory, only 31 bills, it is time for us to come together and identify measures which have strong bipartisan support and would make a meaningful difference to the people of this country.

One of those bills is H.R. 2663, the Workplace Violence Prevention for Health Care and Social Service Workers Act, a bill I introduced back in April with Congressman Don Bacon of Nebraska. We have 151 cosponsors. Ten Republicans are part of this effort. It is supported by 76 healthcare organizations, particularly those centered around nursing, a caring profession that every family relies on.

This bill addresses the frightening and accelerating epidemic of workplace violence that people who go to work every day in our hospitals, nursing homes, EMS, and ambulances, as well as our home health nurses, are facing every single day.

That is not just rhetoric. We did a GAO study a number of years ago and found that people who work in the healthcare sector suffer injuries, sometimes serious, sometimes fatal, five times more than any other sector in the U.S. economy.

There are ways to address this, Mr. Speaker, in terms of putting it into practice. Some preventative measures which hospitals have endorsed and used around the country are: train up their staff, give them a way to identify high-risk patients, give them the equipment, whether it is panic buttons or alerts to get help when they need it, and in some instances to provide more security dealing with more high-risk patients.

The 76 organizations include the American Nurses Association, the Emergency Nurses Association, the American College of Emergency Physicians. The list goes on and on.

They are feeling this every single day. In my district, unfortunately, last October, we experienced the tragic loss of a nurse. Joyce Grayson of Willimantic, Connecticut, was making a home health visit to a halfway house for a high-risk individual. He was on the sex offender list and had been convicted of a violent crime. She went in at 8 o'clock in the morning to administer medication, and she never left. She was found stabbed to death.

This is a woman who was 63 years old, 36 years as a nurse, 26 with the State of Connecticut Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services, 10 years as a home health nurse, mother of 6, and she brought in foster care children. She was identified and awarded the Foster Care Parent of the Year in the State of Connecticut in 2017 by the Department of Children and Families. She was an angel. That was the way she was described at the time that we, as a State, came together to mourn her.

Her family has asked one thing. They want to see change. Their lawyer, Kelly Reardon of New London, Connecticut, gave an interview recently. That is what the family is begging for. They don't want this to happen again.

All of us rely on our healthcare workforce, Mr. Speaker. Republican or Democrat, all of us need them to take care of us. It is time for us to care for them. It is time for us to listen to them. It is time for us to put into practice commonsense measures which are happening intermittently around the country and make it universal and enforceable for all of the people in the caring profession and the healing profession.

Mr. Speaker, let's pass H.R. 2663 in this Congress and do something meaningful for the American people.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source