Nurse at Princess Basma Hospital in Irbid attacked

AMMAN — A nurse at the Princess Basma Hospital in Irbid was attacked for undisclosed reasons by a woman waiting at the emergency room on Wednesday. 

The nurse was later admitted to the hospital and has suffered only minor injuries, according to the hospital’s president, Mohammed Bani Yaseen.

The hospital and the attacked nurse filed a lawsuit against the woman, but President of the Jordanian Nurses and Midwives Association in Irbid Ahmed Horani said that "this [lawsuit] will not be enough to prevent similar future incidents from happening”.

“This trend of attacking hospital staff is something that has been on the rise over the past year and we are afraid it will turn into a normal and frequent matter," Horani told The Jordan Times over the phone on Thursday.

According to its president, Princess Basma Hospital, which has the capacity of 236 beds, takes in five times its normal capacity, putting the facilities and staff under great pressure.

In a telephone interview with The Jordan Times, Bani Yaseen said that the emergency room, where the incident happened, receives around 1,000 patients daily.

"Sometimes the staff is overwhelmed, especially when the patients are ill-treating them and blaming them for the delay. At the end of the day, they are still humans who are doing the best they can," Horani said, adding that the patients and the staff are to be blamed for the attack on the nurse and many other similar incidents.

"Unable to handle the tremendous pressure, doctors and nurses sometimes lose their temper and sometimes patients do not follow the rules of the hospital and also lose their temper.”

An official source, who preferred to remain unnamed, told The Jordan Times that “the Ministry of Health is planning to collaborate with the association and concerned medical entities to organise workshops on ways to eliminate the phenomenon of violence against hospital staff”.