News Photo by Michael Gonzalez A MyMichigan workplace violence poster that reads “Assault is not part of our job. It is a crime” is seen in the MyMichigan Medical Center Alpena entrance lobby last month.

ALPENA — Over the last several years, patients and visitors of MyMichigan Health facilities, including My Michigan Medical Center Alpena, have likely come across signs that read ‘assault is not part of our job’ or similar phrases.

This signage is part of a larger campaign organized to recognize workplace violence in the healthcare field — a problem that is more likely to happen to workers, officials say.

According to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, “75 percent of nearly 25,000 workplace assaults reported annually occurred in healthcare and social service settings.”

Sue Lennon, director of employee health and wellness, and Sherry Warczynski, manager of regulatory compliance and infection prevention, work in the MyMichigan Health system and are part of the Workplace Violence Committee. They said the team was created sometime between 2017 and 2018, due to alarming data regarding the risk of employees.

“We deal with some pretty sick patients who are going through some pretty emotional times,” Warczynski said. “And so our risk is a lot higher than any other industry…All these years that was kind of part of being a nurse, you knew you were probably going to get hit, spit, kicked, slapped, bit. It’s just kind of gone to an extreme and you know, healthcare workers shouldn’t have to come to work and fear for their life.”

Lennon said this awareness campaign is not just meant for visitors or patients, but also for employees. An important aspect of the issue of workplace violence in the healthcare field, according to Lennon and Warcynski, is that staff should report incidents rather than leaving them alone to become a regular occurrence.

Departments with higher risk of an incident are given specific training in collaboration with the Crisis Prevention Institute — an international training organization that specializes in training dealing with assaultive and disruptive behavior — to reduce the total cases that happen. Training courses include steps to deescalate patients and, in extreme cases, the procedure in the event of an active shooter.

Lennon later said the committee’s mission is to analyze MyMichigan’s data and utilize it to create a safer work environment for its staff.

“We’re really ramping up a lot more department-specific education, because our health system is large,” Lennon said. “We have acute care, many outpatient clinics and home care. So really trying to do training and video vignettes that speak to specific areas.”