‘Are you going to keep me safe?’ hospita l workers sound alarm on rising violence

The national COVID-19 public health emergency has been extended for another 90 days.

The new president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) says his organization is focused mainly on the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

Daniel McQuillen, MD, took on the leading role at the IDSA last week. In addition to serving as president of the IDSA, he is a senior physician in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Beth Israel Lahey Health and Lahey Hospital & Medical Center, and an assistant professor of medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston.

He recently spoke with HealthLeaders about a range of issues, including his agenda as IDSA president and the role of infectious disease specialists during the pandemic. The following is a lightly edited transcript of that conversation.

The San Leandro Hospital emergency department, where nurse Mawata Kamara works, went into lockdown recently when a visitor, agitated about being barred from seeing a patient due to COVID-19 restrictions, threatened to bring a gun to the California facility.

It wasn’t the first time the department faced a gun threat during the pandemic. Earlier in the year, a psychiatric patient well known at the department became increasingly violent, spewing racial slurs, spitting toward staffers and lobbing punches before eventually threatening to shoot Kamara in the face.

“Violence has always been a problem,” Kamara said. “This pandemic really just added a magnifying glass.”

Given what the healthcare industry faced in 2020, the seventh edition of our Data Security Incident Response (DSIR) Report, Disruption and Transformation, is aptly titled. As if fighting the COVID-19 pandemic weren’t enough for the industry to tackle, it also faced a surge of ransomware attacks, evolving legal/regulatory considerations, and novel and complex issues presented by pandemic- and technology-driven changes.

The growing wave of ransomware incidents that we saw toward the end of 2019 continued in 2020. Now, however, healthcare organizations are faced with a diabolical twist—in addition to the operational disruption, threat actors are now routinely stealing data and threatening to publish it online as an extra inducement for a ransom payment. With this new tactic, which took off in 2020 and is now the norm for nearly all ransomware matters we handle, came much higher ransom demands, longer downtime, and a significant increase in the number of patients requiring notification per HIPAA regulations.

While fending off cyber threats, we saw healthcare organizations confront the pandemic by transforming the availability and provision of patient care almost overnight through telemedicine. As a further challenge, organizations are dealing with a rapidly evolving legal and regulatory landscape. The 2020 regulatory and legal highlights include:

The CDC continues to update its COVID-19 infection prevention and control recommendations for healthcare personnel. Those recommendations call for the continued use of masks and other source control measures even if you are in an area of low transmission.

At the same time, CMS says it is preparing an interim final rule to require vaccination of healthcare workers in most settings, along the same lines as emergency regulations it issued earlier this year requiring nursing home workers to be vaccinated.

Meanwhile, the FDA revised its guidance on face masks.