For Immediate Release – January 15, 2026
Today’s news that a patient at Mount Carmel Grove City attacked an officer and discharged a firearm inside a hospital is deeply disturbing — but not surprising. Nurses & health professionals should never fear for their lives while caring for patients. Patients should never fear for their lives while seeking care.
Hospitals are meant to be places of healing. Yet across Ohio, nurses and health professionals are being injured, traumatized, and driven out of the profession by unchecked workplace violence. According to the ONA Survey of All Ohio Nurses: 2024 Staffing Findings, 65% of direct care nurses experienced workplace violence in the last year — including threats, assaults, and physical attacks. Nearly a third reported that basic safety measures are rarely or never available where they work.
“These numbers represent real harm,” said Rick Lucas, RN, President of the Ohio Nurses Association. “They represent nurses who have been assaulted, threatened, and sent home injured or shaken — only to be expected back on the job as if nothing happened.”
This is not abstract data. It is the fear nurses carry into every shift and the trauma that follows health professionals home. It is moral injury — created when those making profit-driven decisions ignore repeated warnings from the people providing care.
The consequences extend directly to patients. In the same survey, 63% of direct care nurses said current conditions are pushing them to consider leaving bedside nursing. When nurses & health professionals are harmed or forced out, patients face longer waits, rushed care, closed units, and preventable harm. This is a patient care crisis manufactured by greed — and it is not inevitable.
“What makes the difference is whether nurses and health professionals are organized and have a real voice,” Lucas said. “Across Ohio, when workers stand together through ONA, they have forced healthcare systems to invest in safety and listen to the people on the frontlines.”
That is how safety improvements were won at Aultman Alliance. That is how metal detectors were secured at OSU Wexner Medical Center. Those changes did not happen because executives volunteered them — they happened because nurses and health professionals stood together and demanded better.
To the nurses and health professionals at Mount Carmel: you are not alone, and you should not have to accept fear as part of the job. Organizing with ONA is how workers protect one another, safeguard patients, and reclaim the power to speak up without retaliation.
ONA will continue to stand with nurses and health professionals across Ohio — fighting for enforceable workplace violence prevention plans, staffing that protects staff and patients, and real frontline decision-making power.
Nurses and health professionals deserve safe workplaces and real investment in care. Together, we can force change.
Mount Carmel — it’s time to act.