Friday, December 26, 2008

Whatever You Do... Don't. Blow. Your. Nose.

The Nurse Resource has a link to an article about a woman who may have charges pressed against her for spitting on an ER nurse.  The article contained this gem:

"The saliva in question had already been cleaned off the nurse’s face prior to the deputy’s arrival."

Was this fact actually in question?

"Yes, officer, I have the spit right here dangling from my nose.  I've had to hold my neck back like so for the last 20 minutes while I wated because the darn stuff just wants to slide right off.  Would you like to take a picture?"

Anyway, we had a similar event in our ER a few weeks ago, and the officer said that they were going to charge the guy with felony assault.  Rock on.

4 comments:

GrumpyRN said...

Spitting on people is disgusting and if it is done to staff it is an automatic charge of assault in our hospital, we have a zero tolerance policy towards violence and we always prosecute. In Scotland there is a law which makes it a criminal offence to interfere with an emergency worker in the performance of their duties, this includes ambulance, fire brigade, doctors and of course us. Last case we had (about 2 months ago) was a girl who punched one of our staff and was sentenced to 6 months jail.

Nurse K said...

I think it's always a felony assault if you assault a health care worker vs. a misdemeanor etc.

RN said...

I saw a nurse document RSI as using etomidate and sucks

JED said...

Top this....

I once had a student that was so talkative and would not pay attention in class, she was arrested. Her charge was disconduct!