While a nurse was fatally injured this Monday, May 22 by a man at the Reims University Hospital, a look back at the cases of violence that have occurred in recent years against hospital staff.
Several attacks, sometimes fatal, have occurred over the past twenty years against caregivers in hospitals, before the one which cost the life in the night from Monday to Tuesday to a 38-year-old nurse, attacked with a knife at the University Hospital of Reims (Marne) .
The most serious, which remain relatively rare, are often caused by patients suffering from psychiatric disorders. In other cases, exasperation due to waiting, pain or alcohol is the source of insults, death threats and beatings.
The deadly assaults
- On December 18, 2004, a nurse and a caregiver at the psychiatric hospital in Pau (Pyrénées-Atlantiques) were killed during their night on duty with a knife by a 21-year-old former patient suffering from schizophrenia.
- Two years earlier, on April 10, 2002, a nurse from the psychiatric hospital in Bron (Rhône) was fatally stabbed by a 19-year-old young man also being treated for schizophrenia. A nurse is also injured.
- On July 3, 1999, a nurse from a psychiatric establishment dependent on the CHU of Saint-Etienne (Loire) was injured by a 22-year-old patient, reputed to be dangerous, during a walk in the hospital grounds. She succumbed to her injuries five days later. His killer killed himself in July 2001.
Insults, threats and blows
- On February 18, 2023, in the emergency room of the Ambroise-Paré hospital in Boulogne (Hauts-de-Seine), five staff members, including two doctors, were injured by a patient whose treatment required restraint.
- On January 19, 2019, a man claiming to have suffered from insomnia for several days, insulted and struck a caregiver and two emergency nurses at the Saint-Antoine hospital in Paris (12th) at the time of a finger prick to check his blood sugar.
- On September 7, 2020, in the emergency room of the Robert Debré hospital in Paris (19th), an alcoholic man, unhappy that his son was not taken care of more quickly, injured a nurse, a caregiver, a health executive, and two security guards.
- On September 13, 2016, a doctor had both fractured hands and two nurses were injured by a 21-year-old man who accompanied a friend to the emergency room of the Saint-Denis hospital center (Seine-Saint-Denis).
- A year earlier, on August 9, 2015, a caregiver was attacked in the emergency room of the Bordeaux University Hospital (Gironde) maternity hospital by a man who refused to allow his veiled wife to be examined by a man.
- On May 2, 2012, a doctor and several nurses were violently attacked and injured at the University Hospital of Grenoble (Isère) by half a dozen people unhappy that one of their relatives had been hospitalized in a windowless room.
- On November 11, 2009, the parents of an 11-year-old boy, followed for cancer at the University Hospital of Besançon (Doubs), insulted and beat doctors and service personnel. At the origin of their anger, the chemotherapy treatment of the child, whose family does not accept the side effects.
- On December 20, 2003, three sons of a patient at Saint-Joseph Saint-Luc hospital in Lyon injured nine members of the medical staff following a disparaging remark from a doctor to their mother.