In 2023, a total of 2,840 attacks on nurses were reported in Spain, eight daily on average, according to data from the Observatory of Attacks by the General Nursing Council (CGE)which represents an increase of more than 10 percent compared to the previous year, when 2,580 incidents were recorded.
«There are limits that cannot be crossed, because the selflessness of our professionals does not imply enduring humiliation or aggression. With violence, whether verbal or physical, we must have zero tolerance. There is no justification to feel afraid or suffer injuries, threats or insults when one simply carries out his or her job at work,” says the president of the General Nursing Council, Florentino Pérez Raya.
This week, cases of attacks on nurses have been known in the Canary Islands or Cádiz, while the report highlights the increase in cases compared to 2022 in Aragón (+145), the Canary Islands (+142), the Balearic Islands (+101) and Cantabria ( +72). By autonomous community, Andalusia is the one that has recorded the highest number of these events, with 752, followed by the Balearic Islands (369), Aragón (242), Castilla y León (232) and Galicia (212), Navarre (199), Murcia (165), Asturias (155), the Canary Islands (153) and Castilla-La Mancha (136).
On the contrary, The regions that have reported the least attacks are Ceuta (1) Melilla (1), Extremadura (14), Valencian Community (15), Madrid (30), Catalonia (31), La Rioja (53) and Cantabria (80). While there is no data in the Basque Country.
For his part, the director of the Aggression Observatory, and general secretary of the CGE, Diego Ayuso, explains that “this increase has not really been due to the fact that attacks are increasing in such an alarming way, but rather because there is a greater awareness of professionals when reporting and greater sensitivity when recording data by the autonomous communities.
For Ayuso, these data do not reflect the total number of real attacks. «We know that there is under-reporting of violent incidents in our health centers, especially when they refer to insults and threats, because they are not reported. Hence, since the General Nursing Council “We always insist on the need to report these events, since an attack, whether physical or verbal, that is not reported is a fact that is not known and, therefore, does not exist,” he points out.
The professional who suffers an attack, whether verbal or physical, may suffer “a lot of frustration, a lot of worry,” and, also, can cause sick leave and affect them on a professional level in the way they carry out their activity, “since many times those who suffer an attack think that they have done something wrong, when really it is a situation that has nothing to do with the attitude or professionalism of that colleague.”
Quite the contrary, this situation can occur due to “the stress and anxiety suffered by a patient or family member, due to not having their expectations met, due to the system deficiencies and not because of the specific performance of a professional,” Ayuso stressed.
