An attack last year by a psychiatric patient at Pennsylvania Hospital left a female physician with multiple stab wounds to her head and face after she informed him that he would not be discharged. She said that ten colleagues watched the attack but did not alert hospital security or appear to know how to respond, and that no guards or panic buttons were present.

She later sued the hospital on the grounds that its “abject disregard” for employee safety led to the incident and said that it did not improve security after the incident despite concerns raised by residents and employees.


Spikes in COVID-19 have also made situations like this more prevalent, with Scripps Health staff saying that they have experienced 17% more verbal and physical acts of violence from patients in the past few months as a result of patient frustration with the progress made toward eradicating the virus.

To protect its staff, Cox Medical Center Branson in Missouri equipped 400 of them with panic buttons back in September. A worker can simply click the button to activate a tracing system that notifies and allows security to track and get to the exact location of the worker.

“When Public Safety response is critical and it’s not possible to get to a phone, personal panic buttons fill a critical void,” said Alan Butler, who manages public safety efforts at CoxHealth’s six hospitals and more than 80 clinics.

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