Nurse attacked 10 minutes after sanctions halted after attack on IDF troops.
By JUDY SIEGEL ITZKOVICH, JPOST STAFFsoroka 88(photo credit: )
Medical staff at Beersheba's Soroka Hospital canceled a daylong strike on Sunday, which had been planned to protest the increase in violent attacks by patients' relatives against doctors.
The strike was cancelled due to an attack on a military outpost near the Gaza Strip that left two soldiers dead and one reported missing, but ten minutes after the hospital halted the sanctions, two men hit a nurse in the orthopedics department. Police came and arrested the attackers.
Doctors union head Dr. Yisrael Eillig said the sanctions -- in the form of a Shabbat schedule in operating rooms, diagnostic institutes and outpatient clinics -- were called off when the Beersheba hospital was alerted on wounded in Gaza. "Frightened doctors can not provide optimal medical care," said an angry Eillig, who demanded that the Health Ministry take action. "Individual hospital managements cannot to it alone," he said. Extra policemen brought to Assaf Harofeh Medical Center in Tzrifin have managed to bring down violence against hospital staffers significantly, Eillig added.
Last week, family members of one patients in the internal medicine department cursed a doctor, while in another, a relative attacked a doctor and two nurses. On Thursday, a mother who brought her child to the emergency room threw a telephone at a doctor, but fortunately, it did not hit its target.
The Soroka doctors works committee insists on changes that would allow only one personal to accompany a patient to an emergency room, provide more security and punish violators quickly. "It takes forever for police and the justice system to take action. Doctors and nurses realize that nothing will come of their complaints," Eillig said. "Maybe we should be taking self-defense courses."
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