A DISTURBING picture of the “patient rage” blighting Britain’s hospitals has been revealed with figures showing that each hospital suffers an average of 43 violent assaults per year.

Official logs of violent assaults in hospitals show how staff are being attacked by the patients they are trying to treat. A survey of the country’s largest hospitals, disclosed under freedom of information laws, details assaults with snooker cues, Zimmer frames, hot drinks and in one instance the lid of a lavatory cistern.

Many of the attacks on staff and patients have apparently been triggered by frustration over excessive waiting times. However, a high proportion of accident and emergency patients are in hospitals because of self-inflicted injuries, with 40% being alcohol-related.

Of the 18 trusts contacted by The Sunday Times, Swansea NHS Trust, which runs nine hospitals, registered the most assaults with 423 attacks.

In one incident, at Rotherham General hospital, a doctor was soaked with urine after a patient threw a full bottle across a room. In another, a nurse was left covered in blood after a violent patient threw the contents of his drain bag around a medical bay.

Although the majority of assaults were carried out by patients, a number of attacks were by friends and relatives frustrated at being denied access to patients outside visiting hours. There were also an alarming number of apparently unprovoked attacks.

Details of violents assaults in the National Health Service have not previously been published by the government: an aggregate figure has obscured the scale of the problem by including incidents of verbal abuse. But independent surveys have indicated a rise in the number of attacks over recent years, although this may owe something to a policy of encouraging staff to report all such incidents.

Christine Maddox, 49, is a senior staff nurse at North Tyneside General hospital. She has been violently assaulted at work three times. In the last attack her arm was broken in three places.

“Such attacks should be treated with the same degree of seriousness as attacks on police officers. The message has to be that these attacks will result in severe sentences,” she said.

The government faced heavy criticism earlier this year after it was revealed that of the 116,000 verbal or physical assaults upon NHS staff reported across the UK in 2003, only 50 led to prosecutions.

Tina Donnelly, director of the Royal College of Nursing Wales, called upon employers to take responsibility for prosecuting violent patients. “We are calling for a zero tolerance of abuse, whether verbal or physical, of staff,” she said.

NHS hospitals are being forced to introduce increased security measures. The NHS Security Management Service, which is responsible for the safety of staff and patients within NHS wards, has pledged to train 750,000 frontline staff in “conflict resolution”.

“Violence against staff is completely unacceptable and will not be tolerated,” said a spokesman. “There is no excuse for attacking NHS staff.”

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