Pregnant worker stabbed by patient at Maine psychiatric hospital files lawsuit

Today’s post was shared by The Workers’ Injury Law & Advocacy Group and comes from www.pressherald.com

Jamie Hill-Spotswood told a supervisor that she felt unsafe less than a week before she was stabbed repeatedly in the face and hand, her lawsuit says.

A mental health worker at the state’s Riverview Psychiatric Center who was pregnant when she was stabbed repeatedly by a patient last year has filed a federal lawsuit claiming the state failed to protect her.

Less than a week before the attack on March 16, 2013, Jamie Hill-Spotswood told Roland Pushard, assistant director of nursing at the hospital in Augusta, that she was 18 weeks pregnant and felt unsafe because there was no security on the floor where she worked, she said in the lawsuit filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Bangor.

The attack prompted state officials to bring in corrections officers to monitor patients, and triggered an audit that cost the state millions of dollars in federal funding when federal authorities objected to the new security measures.

Hill-Spotswood said in the lawsuit, filed against Health and Human Services Commissioner Mary Mayhew, that the floor was populated by patients known to be “very, very violent” and known to have threatened or attacked workers and patients many times.

The state did nothing after Hill-Spotswood told staffers at the Augusta hospital that she felt unsafe, and she was never informed that her attacker, Mark Murphy, had a “prolific history of violence,” her attorney, Michael Waxman, said in the six-page complaint.

“So, predictably, when…

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