Government of Jersey

Assaults at the General Hospital (FOI)

Produced by the Freedom of Information office
Authored by States of Jersey and published on 20 July 2018.

Request

Please could you tell me:

The number of assaults carried out by patients on other patients at the Hospital for 2016, 2017 and so far for 2018?

For each year could you breakdown the figures to state whether the assault was verbal, physical or sexual and also include a brief description of the nature of each assault?

If the assault was physical could you state how many for each year involved a weapon and list the weapon;

Could the figures also be broken down to say how many assaults were carried out each year that were racially aggravated?

For each year could you state how many involved police action and what the outcome was?

The number of assaults carried out by patients on staff members or 2016, 2017 and so far for 2018?

For each year could you breakdown the figures to state whether the assault was verbal, physical or sexual and also include a brief description of the nature of each assault?

If the assault was physical could you state how many for each year involved a weapon and list the weapon?

Could the figures also be broken down to say how many assaults were carried out each year that were racially aggravated?

For each year could you state how many involved police action and what the outcome was?

Response

All figures below relate to incidents recorded at the Jersey General Hospital.

Nine incidents of harassment, violence or abuse by a patient to a patient were recorded at the General Hospital in the period from 1 January 2016 to 31 March 2018. For data quality purposes, incident data is reported three months in arrears to allow sufficient time for incidents to be investigated and categorised.

The following table shows the number of incidents by category. Please note that the total number of categories differs to the total number of incidents as incidents can be coded to more than one category. Staff are encouraged to use a single code wherever possible.

	2016	2017	2018 to 31 March	Total
Disruptive aggressive behaviour / other	1	1	1	3
Object thrown other	0	0	1	1
Physical abuse, assault or violence	3	2	2	7
Verbal abuse or disruption	0	1	1	2
Total	4	4	5	13

None of these incidents are recorded as being racially motivated.

Brief descriptions of each incident are not held. Writing a brief description of each incident would be a manual process and would require the creation of new information. The Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011 does not require a Public Authority to produce new information for the purposes of answering a request.

The following table shows the number of incidents where the States of Jersey Police were called.

Police Called?	No	Yes	Total
2016	3	1	4
2017	3	0	3
2018 to 31 March	1	1	2
Total	7	2	9

No arrests were made.

191 incidents of harassment, violence or abuse by a patient to a staff member were recorded at the General Hospital in the period from 1 January 2016 to 31 March 2018. For data quality purposes, incident data is reported three months in arrears to allow sufficient time for incidents to be investigated and categorised.

	2016	2017	2018 to 31 March	Total
Assault with a weapon	0	0	0	0
Disruptive aggressive behaviour / other	17	24	17	58
Incidents related to smoke free breach	1	0	0	1
Object thrown at member of staff	4	2	0	6
Other Abuse	2	5	2	9
Physical abuse, assault or violence	45	19	16	80
Racial abuse	7	4	0	11
Sexual abuse	0	1	0	1
Threatened assault with weapon	1	3	1	5
Verbal abuse or disruption	30	18	9	57
Total	107	76	45	228

The following table shows the number of incidents where the States of Jersey Police were called.

Police Called?	No	Yes	Not answered	Total
2016	80	14	1	95
2017	47	16	2	65
2018 to 31 March	27	4	0	31
Total	154	34	3	191

Six incidents resulted in an arrest and of these, five resulted in a conviction. Fewer than five Patients were detained under the Mental Health Law. The exact number is withheld to protect the identity of individuals.

Articles applied

Article 25 Personal information

(1) Information is absolutely exempt information if it constitutes personal data of which the applicant is the data subject as defined in the Data Protection (Jersey) Law 2005.

(2) Information is absolutely exempt information if –

(a) it constitutes personal data of which the applicant is not the data subject as defined in the Data Protection (Jersey) Law 2005; and

(b) its supply to a member of the public would contravene any of the data protection principles, as defined in that Law.