By Steven Sukkau | Winnipeg Sun
Violence against front-line health-care workers continues to escalate in Manitoba, with the latest incident at Health Sciences Centre (HSC) leaving a health-care aide choked and a nurse assaulted on Sunday, October 19.
The attack, which occurred in the emergency department while staff were attending to a patient accessing mental-health services, has renewed calls from nurses and their union for urgent action to make hospitals safer.
“This is not just a matter of nurse safety,” said Manitoba Nurses Union (MNU) president Darlene Jackson. “If I, as a nurse, am not safe in my workplace, then my patients aren’t safe. Visitors aren’t safe. Anyone who walks into that facility is at risk.”
Jackson said nurses are reporting a troubling surge in assaults across Manitoba, but particularly at HSC in recent months.
“There have been some very worrying incidents at Health Sciences Centre over the past four months, and they seem to be increasing,” she said. “Nurses want the government and the employer to step up and ensure that they have a safe place to work and a safe place to give care.”
In August, MNU Local 10 formally greylisted Shared Health’s Health Sciences Centre, citing repeated failures to address workplace safety.
The move followed a July 2 sexual assault of a nurse within the HSC tunnels, an event that Jackson said “made nurses realize this is not getting better.”
“They tried to work with the employer,” she said. “But they weren’t getting what they needed. A nurse told me one day, ‘It’s taken me a long time to realize my employer doesn’t care if I’m safe at work.’ And that’s heartbreaking.”
The Manitoba government has announced several measures in recent months, including a 24-7 police presence at HSC and the hiring of Institutional Safety Officers (ISOs) but Jackson says those changes didn’t come willingly.
“A lot of the safety things this government is now touting were actually compelled by an arbitrator,” Jackson said. “They didn’t do these things voluntarily. It took a two-year arbitration process for an arbitrator to tell them: you are not mitigating risk for your employees, and you must act.”
The government has promised that by November 1, two police officers will be stationed around the clock in HSC’s emergency department. Jackson said the union has been repeatedly asking for confirmation.
“We’ve reached out to the government several times,” she said. “That date is coming up quickly, and we still haven’t heard back. Nurses are waiting to see if that promise will actually be kept.”
Shared Health, for its part, says it continues to implement security upgrades, from AI weapons scanners and tunnel safety improvements to additional patrols and cameras.
“We are fully committed to listening, learning, and taking meaningful steps to support a safer environment for everyone,” the organization said in an earlier statement.
But Jackson says the pace of change remains far too slow.
“It’s taken arbitration to get even basic safety measures in place. That’s shameful,” she said. “The employer has a legal obligation to ensure staff safety, and they’re falling down on that.”
Jackson said she was particularly frustrated by the employer’s handling of the July sexual assault, when HSC waited more than 12 hours to alert staff.
“They said they didn’t want to worry people,” she said. “But a nurse was sexually assaulted and it could have been anyone: a housekeeper, a visitor, a family member. By not warning people, they left everyone at risk.”
She argued that minimizing or hiding incidents for the sake of reputation puts everyone in danger.
“It’s time to stop worrying about your image and start worrying about the safety of everyone who gives or receives care in that building,” she said.
While Jackson acknowledged that violence in health care is part of a larger societal trend, she stressed that hospitals must still do more to protect those on the front lines.
“There is violence everywhere, no facility is escaping it,” she said. “This isn’t about blame; it’s about reality. Violence happens. Let’s deal with it.”
She said nurses don’t want to discourage people from seeking care, but they do expect the province and Shared Health to fulfill their duty to provide a secure workplace.
“If the concern is that people might be afraid to come to HSC, then make the place safe,” Jackson said. “You can’t provide care if you can’t keep people safe from being attacked. That’s where it has to start.”
According to data from the MNU, there were 812 Workers Compensation claims in 2024 from nurses assaulted or violently attacked on the job, nearly triple the number from 2015. Nationally, the Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions has described violence against health workers as “pervasive, underreported, and far too often ignored.”
Jackson says Manitoba’s nurses are simply asking for the same thing every worker deserves: to go to work and come home safe.
“We’ve made our recommendations,” she said. “They make sense. They’re not costly. They’re meant to prevent more people from getting hurt. It’s time to stop pretending this isn’t happening and deal with it.”
