Home Health & Hospice Week

How can providers keep their visiting staff safe?

Patient screening questions about firearms and other potential dangers to workers are one way to address visiting staff ’s safety concerns.

So says Kathleen Thompson, a nurse with Providence VNA Home Health in Spokane, in a letter printed in the Washington State Nurses Association newsletter. Thompson was the coworker of Doug Brant, the nurse who was shot and killed by a patient’s grandson during his initial assessment of the patient in late 2022 (see HHHW by AAPC, Vol. XXXI, No. 44).

Self-defense training, security for high-risk visits, panic alarms, policies allowing staff to depart the home at any time, and fanny packs to keep one’s keys and phone on the worker’s person are other strategies Providence has implemented, Thompson reports. She also calls for location services.

These measures are becoming increasingly important as violence against home care workers escalates, Thompson argues, citing the death of Connecticut visiting nurse Joyce Grayson last October (see HHHW by AAPC, Vol. XXXII, No. 42).

See Thompson’s article at www.wsna.org/news/2024/a-year-since-home-health-nurse-doug-brant-was-killed.