A former nurse has been awarded thousands of pounds in compensation after suffering a savage attack by a patient.
Lesley Roberts, 55, quit as a mental health nurse last year and has now spoken out about the violence she faced as an NHS frontline worker.
NHS Greater Glasgow & Clyde paid out after Lesley argued she would not have been attacked had the patient’s mental health medication been altered.
Lesley was on an early shift at the Orchard View mental health unit on the Inverclyde Royal Hospital campus, Greenock when she was attacked.
She said: “We had a patient who was extremely mentally unwell and we had been asking the consultant to review her medication for quite some time, from memory about six weeks.
“I also mentioned it to our senior charge nurse who agreed with me and who also wrote to the consultant.
“It wasn’t the patient’s fault – she was extremely unwell.
"She was thinking we were people we weren’t and she was seeing people who weren’t there. But the consultant didn’t come over to change her medication.”
Lesley told how she had gone to help three colleagues who were dealing with the patient using light restraint.
She said: “I could hear screaming coming from the nurses’ station. Three of my colleagues, two nurses and a nursing assistant, were under attack.
“I went in and said I would try to wash her but she got out of bed, lunged at me and pulled me up the bed by my hair. She pulled a clump of hair out my head, I had a baldy patch. And she hurt my neck.”
Lesley added: “She was so mentally unwell because no one was doing the right thing and changing her meds.
“She had been getting progressively worse, biting staff, tearing at their hair and slapping people but nothing was done until I was attacked.”
She said she knew of worse attacks on colleagues but claimed bosses “actively discouraged” staff from reporting assaults.
Lesley said: “One of my colleagues got her collar bone broken and another got her head bitten. Nursing staff are regularly getting beaten up and told not to fill in Datix forms.
“I knew I had the union behind me but most are afraid to rock the boat.”
Her lawyers reached a settlement with NHS Greater Glasgow & Clyde to pay Lesley compensation of £2,600 in an out of court settlement.
The lawyers argued: “Had the patient’s medication been altered prior to the assault then her behaviour would have improved and the assault would not have occurred.
“Following the assault the patient’s medication was reviewed and her aggressive behaviour immediately subsided.”
Lesley said many of her mental health colleagues were injured in attacks by patients - but it often went unrecorded.
She claimed: “If we are short staffed, one of us is attacked or there is a mistake made with medication we are supposed to fill out the Datix System - a form which logs unusual incidents.
“But we are actively discouraged from doing it; they don’t like Datixes coming in.
“They put pressure on staff not to report things and tell them there will be repercussions if they fill the Datix in.”
A spokesman from NHS Greater Glasgow & Clyde insisted: “Our staff are entitled to work free of threats, assaults and intimidation.
“We have a concerted and ongoing campaign to combat aggression. Despite introducing a range of measures to protect our staff and focus on prevention of incidents we are unfortunately still seeing incidents of both physical and verbal abuse.
“Our staff receive a range of support, including Occupational Health, training, and support from our Health and Safety Team and from Police Scotland.
“We actively encourage staff to report incidents through the DATIX system as this helps highlight any issues and enables us to respond appropriately.
"All incidents of violence are fully investigated and are all reported through our Health and Safety Forums.
“We will continue to reassure staff and encourage the use of DATIX through ward and staff briefings.
“If any member of staff feels pressured into doing something they feel is the wrong action to take we would take this seriously.
"We actively encourage our staff to speak up and have an embedded whistleblowing procedure where our staff can raise concerns formally.”
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