A practice has provided self-defence training for employees, in a bid to tackle abuse and violence from patients.
Staff at Keighley Road Surgery in Halifax, West Yorkshire, had grown increasingly concerned about the risks potentially posed by patients.
This was prompted by both recent experience and nationwide figures showing that more than 3,000 people in England were banned from seeing their GP in 2018 on the basis of being abusive, according to figures from the Special Allocation Scheme register.
Will Menzies, practice manager at Keighley Road Surgery, said the training was brought in after a patient threatened to kill him.
He told the BBC: ‘Two years ago, a patient rang the surgery wanting some medicine and he became increasingly aggressive.
‘The call was put through to me and the man said “prepare yourself, I’m coming to the surgery to kill you”.’
He added: ‘Our staff asked us to provide this sort of training, so they have a range of strategies and techniques to deal with this growing issue.’
Around a year ago, a new ‘zero tolerance’ policy was introduced to reduce the volume of assaults on NHS staff, including GPs.
As part of the Department of Health and Social Care’s violence reduction strategy, the partnership between the NHS, police and Crown Prosecution Service jointly aims to speed up the rate of offenders’ prosecutions.
There have been a spate of aggressive episodes directed towards healthcare professionals lately, including a stabbing at an east London practice that led to four people being hospitalised, and a patient’s arrest following an alleged knife attack on a GP during a consultation in Stoke.
Earlier this year also saw a patient who burst into a GP’s consultation room and shot him with a crossbow found guilty of attempted murder.
Elsewhere in the region, Lofthouse Surgery in Wakefield has seen its staff receive bravery awards from West Yorkshire Police, following a violent attack by a patient last year.
Two of the practice’s GPs, Dr Ian Sanderson and Dr Catherine Lloyd, as well as nurse Tina Riordan and a member of the public were recognised for how they responded to an episode where a patient attacked a police officer who had arrived on the scene to handle the situation.
Dr Sanderson, a partner at the practice, told Pulse: ‘While this was an upsetting incident for all involved, I wanted to commend the bravery shown by our staff and patients who were present.
‘We all worked tirelessly to ensure there was minimum disruption for our patients, while ensuring we took care of our colleagues too. Thankfully this was an isolated event and although, like all GP practices, we occasionally have to contend with challenging behaviour, this was an extreme case and not a reflection of the wider practice population we serve.’
