Nurses Say Violent Assaults Against Health Care Workers Are Silent Epidemic

With only six months on the job as a registered nurse, Angela Simpson got hit hard on the top of her head by an agitated dementia patient. His IV had stopped which hurt him, and she was trying to help him.

“It shocked me, so I jumped back. He was on his way to punch me a second time,” the Maryland nurse says. But she was able to avoid another hit. “It was so alarming and so unnatural. But I felt like I had gone through some christening experience, and I was no longer the new girl,” she says. She considered herself lucky because she walked away with a bump on her head.

In health care, there remains a big cloak of secrecy over workers defending themselves from abusive patients and never reporting the incidents. After hearing too many sad and horrific stories of nurses, doctors and others getting hurt, maimed or killed in their jobs, Simpson founded in 2017 and serves as national director of the nonprofit Silent No More Foundation.