[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 8 (Tuesday, January 16, 2024)]
[House]
[Pages H135-H136]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     PREVENTING WORKPLACE VIOLENCE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Connecticut (Mr. Courtney) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. COURTNEY. Mr. Speaker, as we begin the second year of the 118th 
Congress, a Congress which unfortunately in its first year was one of 
the lowest and least productive Congresses in memory, only 31 bills, it 
is time for us to come together and identify measures which have strong 
bipartisan support and would make a meaningful difference to the people 
of this country.
  One of those bills is H.R. 2663, the Workplace Violence Prevention 
for Health Care and Social Service Workers Act, a bill I introduced 
back in April with Congressman   Don Bacon of Nebraska. We have 151 
cosponsors. Ten Republicans are part of this effort. It is

[[Page H136]]

supported by 76 healthcare organizations, particularly those centered 
around nursing, a caring profession that every family relies on.
  This bill addresses the frightening and accelerating epidemic of 
workplace violence that people who go to work every day in our 
hospitals, nursing homes, EMS, and ambulances, as well as our home 
health nurses, are facing every single day.
  That is not just rhetoric. We did a GAO study a number of years ago 
and found that people who work in the healthcare sector suffer 
injuries, sometimes serious, sometimes fatal, five times more than any 
other sector in the U.S. economy.
  There are ways to address this, Mr. Speaker, in terms of putting it 
into practice. Some preventative measures which hospitals have endorsed 
and used around the country are: train up their staff, give them a way 
to identify high-risk patients, give them the equipment, whether it is 
panic buttons or alerts to get help when they need it, and in some 
instances to provide more security dealing with more high-risk 
patients.
  The 76 organizations include the American Nurses Association, the 
Emergency Nurses Association, the American College of Emergency 
Physicians. The list goes on and on.
  They are feeling this every single day. In my district, 
unfortunately, last October, we experienced the tragic loss of a nurse. 
Joyce Grayson of Willimantic, Connecticut, was making a home health 
visit to a halfway house for a high-risk individual. He was on the sex 
offender list and had been convicted of a violent crime. She went in at 
8 o'clock in the morning to administer medication, and she never left. 
She was found stabbed to death.
  This is a woman who was 63 years old, 36 years as a nurse, 26 with 
the State of Connecticut Department of Mental Health and Addiction 
Services, 10 years as a home health nurse, mother of 6, and she brought 
in foster care children. She was identified and awarded the Foster Care 
Parent of the Year in the State of Connecticut in 2017 by the 
Department of Children and Families. She was an angel. That was the way 
she was described at the time that we, as a State, came together to 
mourn her.
  Her family has asked one thing. They want to see change. Their 
lawyer, Kelly Reardon of New London, Connecticut, gave an interview 
recently. That is what the family is begging for. They don't want this 
to happen again.
  All of us rely on our healthcare workforce, Mr. Speaker. Republican 
or Democrat, all of us need them to take care of us. It is time for us 
to care for them. It is time for us to listen to them. It is time for 
us to put into practice commonsense measures which are happening 
intermittently around the country and make it universal and enforceable 
for all of the people in the caring profession and the healing 
profession.
  Mr. Speaker, let's pass H.R. 2663 in this Congress and do something 
meaningful for the American people.

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