TikTok march: Nurses back menaced colleague, raise awareness of patient violence

Support for a nurse who was threatened online may be growing after fellow nurses spotlighted the incident on TikTok. They’re also leveraging the situation to call for greater protection against potentially violent patients.

The threat was directed at an ED nurse employed at 450-bed PeaceHealth Southwest Medical Center in Vancouver, Washington. The online rally began when a nurse active on TikTok caught wind of the anonymous menace and posted a video commenting on it.

Addressing the unidentified nurse under threat, the TikToker, whose handle is Travel RN Coach, summarizes the frightening turn of events:

“The [person who made the threat] said they were not happy with something you wrote in their chart, said that it was falsifying documentation, and that they were making a plan to ‘unalive’ you. They said they were able to get your first and last name through the notes in the patient portal, and they have now accessed your address. They know that you are a wife and a mom to small children. And they have been planning ‘something huge.’”

The short commentary has elicited close to 1,000 comments between two separate TikTok postings, and the reaction has not been limited to social media.

Ahead of the online fallout, the hospital stepped up its own security efforts, according to reports. Hospital officials also alerted the Washington State Department of Health and called in local law enforcement. The latter began an investigation and has brought in the FBI.

Meanwhile the Washington State Nurses Association has posted a statement.  

“Nurses must be able to chart truthfully and accurately for the sake of safe patient care,” the WSNA writes. “Their notes in a patient’s chart should never be weaponized against nurses as they were here [at PeaceHealth Southwest]. It is our sincere hope that law enforcement is able to identify the responsible individual and take all steps needed to secure the safety of the nurses they threatened.”

The union goes on to call the incident a form of workplace violence, adding that such dangers are at an all-time high in healthcare.

In an email sent to hospital staff and covered by a local news outlet, the Lund Report, PeaceHealth Southwest’s interim CEO, Tracey Fernandez, called caregiver safety “our top priority, and we take this [present] threat very seriously.”

For her part, Travel RN Coach tells her TikTok followers the threat came as a comment posted to one of her earlier videos on nurse safety and security.

“I will probably keep making these videos all day until the algorithm helps me go kind of viral and find who I need to find,” she says. “The rising level of violence against healthcare workers is exactly why I made that video about people having access to our private information—and how dangerous [that] is.”