Mustafa says a large hospital system could require 20,000 buttons.Īfter one year, the ROAR-BeWell partnership reported a 39 percent decrease in year-over-year incidents of violence and a 20 percent increase in employee satisfaction with workplace safety. The cost changes based on facility size and needs. The cost: $1 to $2 per employee per day over a five-year period. Maier estimates an AlwaysOn button gets pressed once every few days, which he considers infrequent. When a button is pressed, it alerts the closest person who can help, including security guards trained in de-escalation. On any given shift, about 94 BeWell employees are wearing activated devices that get coded when they clock in and turned in when they leave. A wearable button, however, goes wherever you are. Like most healthcare facilities, BeWell has help buttons on walls, but, “the downside of a static panic button is, you have to be there to push it,” says Mustafa. If a client becomes physically abusive or a danger to themselves, and one person is in the room … It becomes about numbers.” “Oftentimes, our nurses and mental health workers were working one-to-one with a client. They hired more staff, but incidents of violence were almost inevitable. “People were knocking on our doors,” says Maier. and 14,000 addiction centers.ĭuring the pandemic, BeWell experienced increased demand for services - and decreased ability to be in groups, because of social distancing protocols. There are more than 6,000 hospitals in the U.S. Last year, an advisor connected her to Doug Maier, the CFO of BeWell, a 296-bed, inpatient acute and residential behavioral center specializing in addiction in Philadelphia. There’s increased yelling, harassment, abuse,” says Mustafa, “I realized we could really be there to help people.” “There’s this pent-up rise of incivility. They’ve also become a hotbed of everyday aggressions against healers. Hospitals, the places we go to heal, assuming we are safe there, are not just sites of mass shootings, as earlier this month in Tulsa, Oklahoma, or workplaces an employee can sneak an assault rifle into, kill a coworker, escape, and go on to shoot two police officers, as last October at Jefferson Hospital in Philadelphia. In May, Wisconsin Senator Tammy Baldwin introduced the Workplace Violence Prevention for Health Care and Social Service Workers Act, a Senate companion to a bill that passed the House in April 2021 with bipartisan support. The American Hospital Association has been lobbying for federal funding for increased security measures. There’s been an industry-wide outcry for stronger security to protect remaining workers - and to rebuild in order to attract new ones. The pandemic has exacerbated matters, as has nationwide healthcare burnout and staffing shortages. OSHA has said the problem has been around for a while now. An April survey of 2,500 nurses from National Nurses United, the country’s largest nursing union, said 48 percent of nurses working in hospitals reported an increase in workplace violence, up from 31 percent in September 2021. A dangerous workplaceĪccording to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, workers in healthcare and social services now face the highest rates of workplace violence across all industries. ![]() ![]() What increased, however, was violence against healthcare workers. ROAR went on to supply Hilton and Marriott hotels nationwide. In 2018, she turned her B-to-C company into a B-to-B, adapting her device to hotel workers, specifically housekeeping staff, who experienced sexual harassment on the job at a rate of 58 percent. Yasmine Mustafa really knows how to pivot. She gave a TEDx Talk about it, crowdfunded nearly $300,000 for it, won awards for it - and then had to reinvent it when manufacturing costs made it unaffordable to her intended consumers. Mustafa wanted to get it in the hands of the most vulnerable. Her first device was Athena, which, with a push, sounded an alarm, lit a light, and called 9-1-1. ![]() In 2014, she co-founded ROAR for Good, a business that builds wearable, wireless panic buttons. “I’ve always had this naïve mentality that one person can make a difference,” she told the Philadelphia Citizen in 2015.Ī graduate of Temple University’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship Institute, she created an advertising plugin that she sold to WordPress and brought Girl Develop It, a nonprofit that teaches women coding and web development, to Philadelphia. She’d seen the same in our own very high-crime city, including in her neighborhood.Īnd, she believed she could do something to help. Since then, for most of her life, she’s been undocumented, vulnerable to abusive employers, yelled at by strangers to “Go back to your own country.” During her travels through South America, she learned of an endless stream of attacks on women. This story was originally published by The Philadelphia Citizen.Īs a child, she and her fa mily fled Gulf War-torn Kuwait.
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