>>Deadly assaults on US medical workers on the rise; recent spate of attacks across nation is ‘frightening trend’
June 3, 2022>>Four people killed in shooting at Tulsa medical building, Oklahoma police say
June 3, 2022Doctor, 2 nurses stabbed at Encino Hospital Medical Center near Los Angeles; suspect barricaded
LOS ANGELES — A man stabbed a doctor and two nurses inside a Southern California hospital Friday before barricading himself inside the facility, authorities said.
The Los Angeles Police Department got a call around 3:50 p.m. about a possible stabbing at Encino Hospital Medical Center in the San Fernando Valley, Officer Jeff Lee told USA TODAY.
SWAT officers were on the way to the hospital in hopes to “bring this to a peaceful end,” Lee said.
“He’s not running around the hospital. It appears that he’s in an area” and officers were “trying to talk him down,” fellow LAPD Officer Drake Madison said.
All three victims were transported to a local trauma center in critical condition, Nicholas Prange, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Fire Department, told USA TODAY.
Helicopter footage from local TV stations showed one injured employee in blue medical scrubs being wheeled out of the hospital on a stretcher. The front of the hospital was blocked with yellow caution tape and about a dozen emergency vehicles.
The attack comes just two days after a gunman killed four people and then himself at a hospital in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The assailant got inside a building on the Saint Francis Hospital campus with little trouble, just hours after buying an AR-style rifle, authorities said.
The man killed his surgeon, whom he blamed for his continuing pain following a recent back operation, and three other people.
The violence in medical settings is something researchers have warned about in recent years: “The risk of workplace violence is a serious occupational hazard for nurses and other health care workers,” a recent study by National Nurses United found. “Countless acts of assault, battery, aggression, and threats of violence that routinely take place in health care settings demonstrate a frightening trend of increasing violence faced by health care workers throughout the country.”
Contributing: Jeanine Santucci, USA TODAY; Associated Press
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Encino, California, hospital stabbing: 3 injured, suspect barricaded
