Violence against local health care providers is in the spotlight, following the firing of a nurse for speaking out about it.
At a news conference this morning, Dianne Paulin, a former nurse at the North Bay Regional Hospital told her story to reporters.
Here it is in her own words describing her experience at the new hospital.
"It's a very unsafe state of the art hospital. I've been a psych nurse for 25 years, worked on acute services for 17 and forensics for the rest of my years until August 2011 at the new hospital where I got violently assaulted by a client, one of our forensic patients.
"When you walk in to the rooms the doors close on you and you're a captive. You are stuck behind closed doors.
"He took a chair and backed me up against a door, and using the chair, started pounding me up. He hit me in the head, on the shoulders , hit me everywhere.
"I've been through WSIB, I've been assessed by every discipline there possibly is. I've been fighting to have equal money. I used to make $65,000 a year in 2011 now I make $22,000 a year through WSIB.
"I'm losing everything I own because I got hurt!
"WSIB took away my license to work with psychiatric patients --- well that's all I've done all my life. I don't know anything else. So my career was taken away but they want me to work at customer service for $12 an hour, saying I can still work a little bit somewhere else.
" I suffer from post traumatic stress disorder. I've been on medication since 2011 --- all different kinds and all different side effects, my anxiety is sky high. I don't have quality of life whatsoever and I'm losing everything I own."
Paulin says the hospital is not a safe place to work.
"The doors should not close or lock behind you when you walk into a client's room. Just after what happened to me, somebody took a chair and broke all the glass at the nursing station. They are very, very sick clients and they are psychotic and they should not have a chair to use against the staff.
"There is a culture of fear in the new hospital, right from the beginning. There's been lots of other nurses that have been hurt as well. The security is not there. Sure there are cameras all over the place but who is watching them?
"Management is not there for you. I was blamed that it was my fault that I went to talk with the client in his room. I'm a nurse, and when a client is crying, that's what a nurse does, go and talk to their clients. I've talked with my clients all my life, why would I not talk to him this time? He's crying. He's not well."
Paulin was at the news conference along with her daughter-in-law and former North Bay Regional Hospital patient Tamara Atkinson. She was in the acute patient care unit.
She says she's seen the violence firsthand because of understaffing.
"People having to step in until the nurse arrives.
She cites the example of a fight in the sunroom over a TV show.
"We couldn't get a nurse to come because she was dealing with a patient, the other was behind the glass at all time to answer the phones and whatever comes in, you have people on lunches.
"One time we were in the middle of a fight. Two patients were going at it and we patients had to step in until a nurse arrived because it was so difficult for them to make it there on time because of the understaffing.
"After an attack like this the nurses go out of their way to make sure people are ok, does anybody need to talk to us. They feel bad but it's out of their control, out of their hands. They're trying to do their job but they're understaffed. They can't be everywhere at once.
"It's scary sometimes when you are trying to recover and you have issues like this happening."
