More ED staff are wearing body cameras for safety. Are they working?

Reveal Media

By Daniel Pye

In response to a surge in abuse directed at medical staff, more trusts are using body cameras in emergency departments and mental health wards. Doctors.net.uk examines what that means for doctors and patients – and for tackling the underlying causes of violence.

It was after a patient pulled a knife in the emergency department at Manchester Royal Hospital that Dr Daniel Kristiansen decided to start wearing a body camera.

For him, it was the final straw. “The rates of violence and aggression across all the trusts I have worked at feel to be increasing and increasing and increasing weekly,” he told Doctors.net.uk. “If I cast back to 2015 when I qualified, it felt like quite a rare occasion compared to now.”

Weeks after he started wearing the camera, he saw a patient punching the walls and making “really vile, horrible physical threats towards my consultant”. The senior doctor had barricaded himself behind a door for his own safety.