[caption id="attachment_4198" align="alignleft" width="300"]121RN members and staff at the Cal/OSHA workplace violence in healthcare advisory meeting in Oakland on November 13.[/caption]

Today, SEIU Local 121RN President Gayle Batiste, RN, CNOR, spoke at the second Cal/OSHA advisory meeting on November 13 in Oakland. This meeting was specifically to discuss workplace violence prevention in non-hospital healthcare settings as part of the process of getting to a comprehensive workplace violence prevention standard for healthcare workers. Here are her remarks:

My name is Gayle Batiste. I am a Registered Nurse at Northridge Hospital Medical Center in Northridge, California.

I am also the President of SEIU Local 121RN, a local that represents Registered Nurses, most of whom work, like me, in private acute care hospitals. When our local embarked on our campaign to get a Cal/OSHA standard around workplace violence prevention for healthcare workers, we committed to educating, mobilizing, and organizing around the facts. And the fact is that workplace violence doesn’t know any boundaries.

I am here today because – although I am a nurse who works in an acute care, private hospital – I want to stress how important it is that this standard covers all healthcare workers, wherever they work or whomever they work for.

Our sisters and brothers in non-hospital healthcare settings – long-term care facilities, nursing homes, correctional facilities, home healthcare, psychiatric facilities – are not immune from workplace violence. Our sisters and brothers at STATE facilities are not immune from workplace violence.

The reality is that all healthcare workers are at risk for the hazard of workplace violence. We need a standard that includes all of us, regardless of our job title or where we work. We need site-specific mechanisms of control so that our public health nurses can be safe, so that our psych techs can be safe, so that our doctors can be safe, so that our physical therapists can be safe, so that our emergency room nurses can be safe. We all need and deserve to be safe at work.

All of our lives are valuable.