Violent Nation: Almost Half Of Doctors & Hospital Staff Attacked By Patients' Families

Turks are massively violent even towards members of their own Islamic society whom they perceive as being there to help them. Just try to imagine how much quicker and even more prone to violence they are to those outside of their group, whom they do not consider as Turkish or Mahometan.

Hürriyet: Biggest hospital health threat: patient families

3/15/2011

Medicine is a dangerous profession in Turkey, where half of all doctors and more than a third of nurses working at polyclinics and emergency services say they have been exposed to physical and verbal abuse on the job. Patients’ families are often the perpetrators of violence, hospital personnel report in a survey, saying such incidents are on the rise, statements seemingly corroborated by a recent beating assault in Mardin and a stabbing case in Kars

When Erdal Aydoğan’s wife fell ill Sunday night, he took her to Kızıltepe State Hospital in Southeast Turkey’s Mardin province for treatment. But when he found out that treatment included a male nurse giving his wife an injection, Aydoğan reportedly exploded.

“How could a man give an injection to my wife,” Aydoğan yelled before allegedly beating and punching male nurse Cafer Cengiz, 25, in the hospital’s emergency services area. ...

Cengiz’s experience is not unusual in Turkey, where a recent poll by the Istanbul Medical Chamber showed that nearly half of all doctors working at polyclinics and emergency services in hospitals, and more than a third of nurses, are exposed to physical and verbal violence – often by family members of the patients.

Seventy-two percent of participants in the survey agreed with the statement, “Violent incidents have increased within the last year,” while 51 percent agreed that, “Violent incidents have gone up at the institution where I work.”

Another such incident occurred Saturday, when Bülent Öcal, a doctor at Kars State Hospital in Eastern Turkey, was stabbed in the hospital’s polyclinic by a patient and his two relatives for not taking good enough care of the patient, whose nose was bleeding.

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Medical staff working in emergency services reported the most mistreatment, the Istanbul Medical Chamber poll said. Overall, 45 percent of doctors, 35 percent of nurses, 11 percent of administrative clerks and 7 percent of security guards said they had been exposed to violence at work. Twenty-nine percent of all health employees said they encounter physical and verbal abuse almost every day.

Following such incidents, 40 percent inform the police and 33 percent file a case.

A separate poll conducted by the Isparta and Burdur Medical Chambers showed that 45 percent of health employees have been exposed to physical violence in the last year.

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