Gun incident at hospital raises safety concerns

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/12/2024 (264 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

WINNIPEG — A shooting at a northern Manitoba hospital is raising concerns about health facility safety with nurses and doctors calling for better security and protocols.

A 33-year-old man was arrested on Christmas Eve for pointing and shooting a firearm inside the Thompson General Hospital and faces a slew of firearms charges.

The accused was in the hospital’s chapel when he pointed a gun at a male nurse, RCMP said in a news release Friday. Mounties were called to the hospital around 4 p.m. and found staff had restrained him.

Officers seized the weapon and found a bullet hole and ammunition in the chapel.

An RCMP spokesperson said the accused was not a patient at the hospital.

Manitoba Nurses Union president Darlene Jackson said the incident magnifies underlying issues about patient, staff and facility safety and protocols.

“This person did not present to the emergency room, and one thing that really worries me is once they realized there was someone in the facility with a weapon, the manager that day called for a lockdown, but they don’t have a protocol,” Jackson said Friday.

Staff who work at the hospital told Jackson the man smuggled a long gun into the facility and locked himself in the chapel. A patient went to use the chapel, discovered its doors were locked and informed staff.

The RCMP spokesperson said it is still unknown how long the accused was in the hospital or when he got to the chapel.

Jackson is calling on proper emergency protocol for “high-risk” facilities, like Thompson’s hospital.

“The nursing staff have been asking for a code silver protocol throughout the Northern Health Region for a very long time. It just has never been developed,” she said. “This is a facility that’s at high risk with the activity in the community.”

A code silver is a universally-recognized emergency alert used in hospitals to indicate an active assailant and that a police response is required.

The Winnipeg Regional Health Authority uses code white protocol when health-care workers or security guards are confronted with violent or aggressive persons and need help to de-escalate the situation.

A Northern Health Region spokesperson said code white protocol is in place but did not elaborate on what that entails.

Data on weapons-related incidents within Northern Health Region facilities was not available Friday.

In an emailed statement, Doctors Manitoba said it was distressed to hear about the situation and physicians, health-care workers, patients and their families have the right to expect a safe space in hospitals free from weapons, violence, and threats.

A third of doctors reported a physical safety incident in the previous year, spokesperson Keir Johnson said.

“We must all work together to make our facilities safe and secure, while also ensuring health care is properly resourced to offer care to patients and support for their loved ones,” the statement said.

Jackson said the province needs to fund more institutional safety officers for health facilities.

“Nurses have been physically abused, verbally abused, and they definitely need to have ISOs in those facilities,” she said. “The government has to be behind this. If you want to fix health care, as you promised pre-election, then providing appropriate security for front-line staff is part of the deal.”

The specially trained officers have the authority to restrain people and are armed with pepper gel.

Since taking office, the NDP has launched the institutional safety officer program at multiple Manitoba hospitals and installed AI-based weapons scanners at Winnipeg’s Health Sciences Centre emergency room entrance, Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara said in an emailed statement.

A Shared Health spokesperson said the province has funding for 105 institutional safety officer positions, of which 90 will be filled by Jan. 1. The funded positions are at HSC, St. Boniface Hospital, Victoria Hospital, Brandon Regional Health Centre and Selkirk Mental Health Centre.

The spokesperson said a three-month pilot project also got underway earlier this month, with Long Plain First Nation safety officers stationed at Portage District General Hospital three nights per week.

In 2022 HSC installed “amnesty lockers” to allow people to voluntarily lock up items that might be considered weapons.

Asagwara said the province will “work with experts” to improve safety and security at Thompson General Hospital.

Russell Hyslop, 33, was charged with multiple weapons offences, including discharging a firearm while being reckless, mischief under $5,000, careless use of a firearm, unauthorized possession of a firearm, possession of a restricted firearm, pointing a firearm, possession of a weapon contrary to an order and possession of a weapon for dangerous purposes.

He was remanded into custody.

» Winnipeg Free Press