Nurses are getting assaulted at work and no one listens [PODCAST]

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A nurse survived a violent assault at work, then watched her hospital treat her like a liability, not a victim. In this episode, June Garen, a retired psychiatric and operating room nurse and author, and Carleigh Beriont, a former union organizer who teaches U.S. history and public policy, explain why violence against nurses and doctors gets treated as part of the job. You will hear what actually happens to a health care worker after an assault, why so many facilities do not even track these incidents, and how understaffing and private equity ownership make hospitals more dangerous. This episode is based on their article “Violence against health care workers: the silence must end,” published on KevinMD. Beriont lays out the bipartisan legislation and the safe staffing and unionization fights that could change it, and June makes the case for why workers on the front lines have to start speaking up. Press play to understand why the people who take care of us are not safe at work, and what has to change.

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This episode is cited in the KevinMD record on violence against health care workers.

Transcript

Kevin Pho: Hi, and welcome to the show. Subscribe at KevinMD.com/podcast. Today we welcome June Garen and Carleigh Beriont. June is a retired nurse and author. Carleigh is a local government official. And today’s KevinMD article is “Violence against health care workers: the silence must end.” June and Carleigh, welcome to the show.

June Garen: Thank you so much, Kevin.

Carleigh Beriont: Good morning.

Kevin Pho: All right. So I’m just going to ask both of you to briefly introduce yourself, and then I’m going to go back to June to talk about the article. So June, why don’t you tell us a little bit about your story?

June Garen: I am a retired nurse. I retired in 2025, and I had previously worked in both psychiatric nursing and in the operating room, and had been the survivor of a pretty violent assault in the workplace. Therefore, I ended up writing a book called “Hey! I Could Use a Little Help Here!” and that’s where we had met previously, Kevin.

Kevin Pho: All right. And Carleigh, tell us a little about your story.

Carleigh Beriont: Yeah. So I am a mom of two. I am a former union organizer. I helped organize the graduate student workers at Harvard University, where I teach about U.S. history and public policy, and I’m also a candidate for Congress in New Hampshire’s 1st District, which is one of the projects June and I have been working on this year, helping people take better care of themselves and their families, and what role government can play in that.

Kevin Pho: All right. So June, for those who didn’t get a chance to read your article, just tell us a little bit about your story, what happened, and then the article itself.

June Garen: Ooh, I’d love to, Kevin. It kind of came from a visceral place, because when I retired, I totally retired. I let everything go. I decided to put everything away and focus on things like knitting, gardening, the dogs.

And then I started being more involved in politics and raising my voice to advocate for others. And one day I was in a meeting and heard that there had been a death in Minneapolis. I went sort of sailing through social media like we usually do when we’re not paying attention to meetings that we should be paying attention to, and came across the actual video of Alex Pretti, who’s a nurse, being executed, which sort of hit me beyond a visceral level.

It was a sucker punch to my soul, and that’s what I say in the article. This retired nurse kind of came back up and out and reared her head and said, “No, we have to start speaking up.” I sit in a position of great privilege. I no longer have to answer to anybody. I answer to my own conscience now. I can speak up and I can speak out, but I need to have somebody listen to me, and that was one of the most difficult things after I was assaulted, finding somebody who listened, which is why I wrote my book.

And it just happened that I knew this wonderful woman who was running for Congress, and I said, “OK, look, this is the deal. This is where you get to show what you’re made of. You need to listen to me. Are you willing to? Because you need to step into this. Nobody’s listening to health care workers, the boots-on-the-ground people who are being hurt in the workplace.”

And that’s where the birth of that blog that we submitted to you came from, on that very visceral level.

Kevin Pho: So June, for those who didn’t get a chance to read your article specifically, when you said that no one was listening to you after you got assaulted, tell us more. Tell us exactly what happened and who specifically you felt was not listening to you.

June Garen: I think what happens, from the moment a health care worker is assaulted, and what I learned in the book from interviewing other nurses, is that we tend to become not even a statistic, because many places don’t even keep track of the statistics. You become almost a liability, or almost a big shadow, where you’re forgotten, where you’re sort of pushed into a corner at the edge of the herd, where somehow you’re shamed, you’re blamed, you were in the wrong place, you made a bad decision, this is your fault.

Why did you do this? Your competence is called into question. You’re gaslit almost with, “Well, we provided you with everything you needed. Why didn’t you use it?” And I saw that same sort of vortex whirling around that whole situation with Alex Pretti. Within minutes, social media blew up with those kinds of judgments.

And I thought, this is just on a bigger level what we do to health care workers who are boots on the ground.

Kevin Pho: And Carleigh, when you first heard June’s story, tell us what your first reaction was.

Carleigh Beriont: I was really horrified, and just so grateful to someone like June for speaking out about her story. I think too often these kinds of incidents are treated as par for the course, or as part of the job, and people aren’t given that kind of platform, especially people who are working really hard to take care of our most vulnerable community members right now.

And so to me, I said, this is a policy problem, right? There needs to be something that we can do at the federal level to ensure that we have nurses who are able to organize and unionize, who are able to have safe staffing. And this is something that affects not just the patients, it affects the nurses and their families.

June is a mom, and her kids both work in health care, and I want to make sure that they’re able to take care of all of the people in our communities who need that care. But they can’t do it if they’re basically on the policy menu instead of sitting around the table right now, which is what’s happening.

Kevin Pho: And Carleigh, you said that this is more of a policy problem. So what’s been done in the past, and what is still lacking, and what needs to be done going forward?

Carleigh Beriont: Gosh, so many things. And I think this is where a campaign for Congress has really given me insight into this process and how we can organize effectively to build power.

So one of the things that’s really awesome in New Hampshire this year is that we had our nurses form a union, which is one of the great labor victories that we’ve seen in a period that has not really been super conducive to organized labor. And what this means is that they can get together and they can force administrators to listen to their concerns and to institute all sorts of new procedures to make sure that they are safer.

And one of the places where this comes up a lot has to do with private equity and bankruptcy protection. So in New Hampshire, we have 16 Genesis HealthCare facilities, and Genesis was bought out by private equity a few years ago and has been going through bankruptcy. And we also saw a repeal of nursing requirements, and so instead of having a nurse 24 hours a day on staff, you only have one for eight.

And that leads to negative outcomes for the people who are receiving care there. And so it’s all sorts of little parts of this process that you don’t really know about unless you’re actually spending your time listening to nurses like June and her family, listening to the patients in these care facilities, rather than spending your time as a politician listening to the lobbyists and the groups that have a lot of money that enable people like me to get into office and actually craft policy.

Kevin Pho: So June, how pervasive of a problem is this? I know that you were so brave in sharing your story, but just speaking on behalf of your colleagues, for those who may not understand the scope of the problem, how common is violence and assault against health care workers today?

June Garen: Well, I believe the MNA, the Massachusetts Nurses Association, has just made a very visual display of how many health care workers are assaulted in a day, by putting actual scrubs up on the steps of their state house. And it’s not even the people who are reported. It’s the verbal assaults, it’s the threats, it’s the shoves, it’s just the overall lack of social contract to go into a place to be healed and actually be respectful.

My son is an emergency medicine physician. My daughter is a social worker who works in the emergency room. I worry every day for them. They are literally on the front lines, and I never know what’s going to happen, because whatever was happening before comes into that environment. Whatever upset was happening in somebody’s life comes into that environment.

And I think about my kids, and they were all dewy-eyed in the picture that I put in my book in the dedication. He was fresh out of medical school. She was fresh out of her MSW. And I wrote, “You’re my gift to the world,” and I still believe it, because they’re good people and they’re compassionate and they want to do the right thing, and they’re great advocates for their patients.

But underneath their picture I wrote, “May you always be safe.” And I worry about that, and I worry about other people’s kids, because you never know, without that social contract, when it’s going to come apart, when somebody’s going to show up with a gun, and you work under those situations daily.

So it’s not just the actual incidences, it’s the anticipation of going to work and trying to do a job where you’re healing people, knowing it could be the last day you go to work.

Kevin Pho: And June, after you were assaulted, just tell us from a personal level, how did that affect how you saw patients going forward? How were you able to go back to work after that incident?

June Garen: I wasn’t able to go back to the place that I had worked. I had been written out of there. I was retired on disability because I couldn’t have another head injury. There was no guarantee I could recover from a second one.

And it shifted my perspective of how I looked at people. I found that I was much more guarded. And where I had been fearless before, I stayed an arm’s distance away. I was flatter, if that makes sense. I was not as giving. My soul was in a hard little case. I don’t think I was as good of a nurse after that.

Kevin Pho: Carleigh, when you hear June’s story and you’re thinking about the policy options, I do have a lot of hospital administrators listen to this particular podcast. What are some of the messages that you want to share with our hospital administrators to take the issue of violence against health care workers more seriously, or actions they need to take to protect the safety of our health care workers? What’s a message that you want to share with them?

Carleigh Beriont: Yeah, so the two things that I would definitely highlight right away are that it’s important for us to sit with June’s story and recognize what that does to somebody who is providing care for so many other people, and also to know that this is something that is so common in health care right now.

And I recognize the incredibly difficult position that so many of our hospital administrators are in. I’ve held a number of roundtables where I’ve brought together people from all levels of the care system, from nurses to people who work in billing, to people who are administrators, doctors, surgeons, to actually sit together and have a conversation about what they wish politicians understood better, why it is so hard if they’re spending so much time on paperwork, what’s getting missed right now.

And one of the big things that constantly comes up is just the costs, right? The high cost of keeping our health care system going right now. And there’s bipartisan legislation that can help us address the workplace violence that we are seeing. So one of the pieces of legislation that I would be really excited to champion in Congress next year is the Workplace Violence Prevention for Health Care and Social Service Workers Act, and it requires the Department of Labor to address workplace violence, and it requires employers to make efforts to really protect people and to educate them and to keep them safe, and to let people process the kind of incidents that are all too common right now.

But one of the challenges and impediments to getting this type of legislation passed and implemented is the cost. And so I want people to know that we will find the money for the people who are taking care of our friends and our neighbors and the most vulnerable people in our communities, so that they can do that. We will find that money, and we need to agree that this is something we need to invest in right now.

Kevin Pho: And Carleigh, when it comes to cost, we already know that health care is buckling under runaway health care costs, and asking them to spend more on something sometimes obviously is a hard ask. So of all the other asks of our health care system, tell us why this one takes precedence.

Carleigh Beriont: Well, I come at this as the person that I am, right? I’m a mom. I know that if I can’t take care of myself, I can’t take care of my kids. And if we don’t take care of our nurses and our doctors, then they can’t take care of us, and this is something that we need to invest in right now.

One of the reasons health care is so expensive, and I fully get this: My husband’s a public middle school teacher. He got a 3 percent raise last year, but our health care costs went up 15 percent. And in local government, I’m on our budget committee, and I know that the cost of health care is bankrupting our communities right now, and it’s not because we’re providing great care to everybody.

It’s because of corporate monopolies that own our doctors and our insurance companies and our pharmacies and our hospitals and take a cut at every step of the way. And so just as I think there is a lot of increasing consensus around this idea that we need to really prioritize taking care of the people who take care of us, we also recognize that in order to get the money to do that, we need to take away some money from some of the other places, whether that’s cutting into corporate monopolies or taking some of the money that we spend on things like war right now and bringing it back to the United States so we can take better care of people here.

Kevin Pho: We’re talking to June Garen and Carleigh Beriont. June is a retired nurse and author. Carleigh is a local government official. Today’s KevinMD article is “Violence against health care workers: the silence must end.” Now I’m going to ask each of you just to briefly close with some take-home messages that you want to share with the KevinMD audience. June, why don’t we start with you?

June Garen: Oh, Kevin, I just hope that we can make a shift, and I hope that leaders will start to listen. That would be my goal. And I hope that maybe there are some other old dragons who are going to wake up and listen to this podcast and maybe be inspired to read the article, and some of the old folks like me will start to move back into being radicals and shift some of the energy in health care to advocate, because there is nobody in this world who is not affected by health care.

Kevin Pho: And Carleigh, we’ll end with you, your take-home messages.

Carleigh Beriont: My take-home message is just thank you to June for being so willing to share your story, and not just that, but being willing to organize around it. So we need leaders right now who can listen to us, the people who are doing the hard work closest to the problems, and then move that up the ladder so that we can enact the kind of policies we need to take better care of ourselves and the people around us.

So my closing message is just that this is possible, right? When we listen to one another and we work together, that is how we build power, and that is how we make change, and we have so much power. People like June and her family and all of the nurses and doctors out there are the people who help us take care of one another, and we need to learn from them right now so that we can take better care of ourselves in this country.

Kevin Pho: June and Carleigh, thank you so much for sharing your perspective and insight. Thanks again for coming on the show.

June Garen: Thank you, Kevin.

Carleigh Beriont: Thank you.

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