After hit-and-run at Philadelphia hospital, union president calls for security to increase outside ERs
Nurses are often the frontline of critical health care delivery. Their profession is a mission of healing.
Over the weekend that mission involved caring for three of their own when someone driving a silver Jeep dropped off a 28-year-old man suffering from multiple gunshot wounds.
Philadelphia police said the driver struck three nurses attempting to provide care.
"When it's one of our own, we begin to feel vulnerable," said Maureen May, president of the Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals.
May is a registered nurse with more than 40 years of experience and works at Temple University Hospital.
"We're caregivers," May said. "We should not have to experience the violence that is happening in hospitals and even outside at Presbyterian. That should not happen."
Oscar Hankinson has been on the front lines as an ER nurse since the early 90s.
"In the emergency department we basically meet people on the worst day of their lives," Hankinson said. "We're used to that situation, that situation where someone is coming in who's been hurt whether it's from a gunshot wound or someway they have been hurt, have been dropped off at our door."
Both of them say a security presence is essential outside hospitals.
"Fortunately at Temple, we do have guards stationed here and that's a resource that we need and every hospital should have outside their emergency room," May said.
Police described the driver of the Jeep only as a man in his 20s and are searching now for any video footage that can help in finding him.