A dozen workers from a psychiatric hospital near Seattle flew to Washington, D.C. to picket the National Association for Behavioral Healthcare’s annual meeting in an effort to get their employer to meet demands for a safer work environment, better staffing, and the hiring of security professionals.
They are also demanding that their employer, Cascade Behavioral Health Hospital, a private psychiatric facility owned by Acadia Healthcare and located in Tukwila, Washington, address what they call “racist harassment” by managers who have allegedly told many workers, who are primarily people of color, that they are going to be “filtered out,” Alazar Yirgu, a mental health technician at the facility, told this news organization.
The workers have been conducting a “safety strike” to protest working conditions at Cascade since early August. The protest in Tukwila began after a dozen or more workers were hurt in an August 1 incident during which they had attempted to restrain a violent patient.
“We’ve been out there for 2 months, and we will continue until our voice is heard,” said Mr. Yirgu, who was hospitalized as a result of the August patient outburst that he said has left him unable to work since the incident.
On Oct. 7, Mr. Yirgu and coworkers brought the protest to Washington, D.C., in a continued effort to voice their need for adequate personal protective equipment, increased staffing, and the hiring of security personnel.
“Any health care professional should not be fearful to do their job, because once they are in that state of mind, once they are fearful for themselves, then they are not doing their jobs; they are preoccupied with their fears,” said Mr. Yirgu, who has worked as a technician for 6 years.
Unsafe patient load
The workers reacted quickly after the August 1 patient outburst because there have been multiple previous incidents, Mr. Yirgu said.
In a 2019 news story by the Seattle Times, the newspaper reported there had been 65 assaults on patients or staff at Cascade from 2016 to 2018, resulting in concussions and broken bones in some instances.
Mr. Yirgu said that more recently, a patient broke a second story window, jumped to the ground, and ran off.
At the facility, workers are often assigned to as many as a dozen or more patients, he said, noting that at other psychiatric institutions, he’s cared for a maximum of five patients at once.
The Tukwila police have pushed back against the workers’ description of the incident in which Mr. Yirgu was injured, and Cascade Behavioral Health has aggressively defended its facility.
According to Mr. Yirgu, the expletive-spewing patient was clearly a danger to himself and others – especially after he stole a key card that would give him access to the entire facility, including the kitchen where knives were stored.
When more than a dozen staff answered the unit’s “Code Gray,” they were unable to subdue or restrain him. Mr. Yirgu ended up on the floor underneath the patient after the patient had jumped off a table.
As the incident unfolded, several workers called the police, who initially refused to go to the facility, saying that a new law prevented them from assisting with the restraint if there was no assault.
The Tukwila Police Department report shows that officers finally did go to the facility and determined that “a crime had not been committed based on the information presented to them, that there was no imminent threat of bodily harm, and that there was no legal grounds or authority for them to assist medical staff with physically restraining a patient.”