Psychiatry chief about the violence: "There is always a risk"

The patient is charged with serious abuse and abuse by three of the psychiatry staff. A female attendant was beaten so badly that she coughed.

The Head of End Psychiatry now works to both investigate the incident and secure the work environment. The union's representatives have been included in the investigations and Agneta Nilsson Lohse believes that both she as an employer and the union share the same picture of what needs to be done.

- We will do an event analysis to find out what preceded this and what we can learn from it.

The staff has been trained in attending and self-protection for several years. Newly trained staff always receive training and everyone in the staff has alarms to call for help, says Agneta Nilsson Lohse.

- The risk of meeting violent patients exists every day. We train our staff on how to meet patients, how to read the situation and to converse with patients when a situation is at risk of being triggered. But sometimes that is not enough and then we have trained in self-protection.

Self-protection means, among other things, how to use certain approaches to get out of a risky situation.

Details about the current event do not want to comment on the CEO. Nor how the staff feels.

- I can say that they have received adequate help based on the situation they have been in, says Agneta Nilsson Lohse.

The incident dealt with in district court has affected the other staff.

- It has led to more talk about it and the staff are more observant.

In police interrogations, the staff have stated that they wanted to have a male colleague on the relevant job passport, as security.

Need more male attendants in the business?

- We have been involved in discussions about how we can secure our workplaces by having a group of both male and female employees on all passports. It looks different for different departments, but we see it as a clear asset to have both and on all passports. But then comes a reality between where it is not always possible, says the head of operations for end-psychiatry, Agneta Nilsson Lohse.