Registered nurse Carol Arndell had just begun her afternoon shift on a ward at a northern NSW hospital in March 2025 when a patient’s attack changed her life. 

An elderly patient with Alzheimer’s was being “verbally and physically abusive to staff,” Carol explained. 

When he left his room in a pair of pull-ups and a sheet around him, Carol followed him through the ward “to make sure he didn’t fall.” 

But as Carol turned to close another patient’s door, the male patient placed his arm around her neck, pulling her into him. “He completely squashed my throat, and he had both my arms pulled to my sides. I was wearing a duress button, but I couldn’t get to it.” 

“I completely lost my hearing, and I dissociated from my body. I didn’t know whether I was going to live or die.” 

The next thing Carol recalls is two nurses running towards her. “They pulled their duress simultaneously.” 

The attack left Carol unable to speak, eat or sleep properly. “I couldn’t swallow properly, I couldn’t talk. The pain that I had in my throat was unbelievable.”  

Prescribed Panadeine Forte for pain relief, she couldn’t drive. For weeks, she had to communicate by text message, change her diet and learn how to swallow. 

Twelve months on, Carol still experiences pain, and while she can now speak, her voice has changed. “I won’t get it back again, not the way it was.” 

While traumatised by the attack, it has been just as difficult for Carol to come to terms with the hospital’s response. 

“After the attack, they just took him back to his room,” Carol explains. Code Blacks continued over the following weeks as the patient attacked other people. 

A management promise to install a Health and Security Assistant on the ward if there were any behavioural patients “happened for a little while, but then it went out the window,” Carol said. 

“I cannot go back to my original workplace because of the lack of safeguarding.” 

During a medication review for her attacker, Carol was horrified to discover his doctors had decided against prescribing a medication that could have helped manage his behaviour because it could have “caused him to fall.” 

A cold debrief was held a couple of weeks later to discuss how work colleagues could have handled things differently, but Carol says she felt embarrassed about not being able to speak and did not attend. “Instead, I emailed my thoughts on the attack and the situation.” 

Carol says she was appalled when a manager later compared the incident to her own experience at work of “being slapped on the cheek.”  

She is still waiting for a genuine apology and recognition of what happened to her from NSW Health.  

She has only recently been able to go back to work, but medical appointments and psychological therapy continue. 

She has lost income: ongoing fatigue means she can no longer earn shift work penalty rates. 

Unable to return to the ward, she is working day shifts in outpatient care. “There is so much that I wanted to do in nursing,” she said. 

“I’m not the same happy person I was before this happened. I still go through the memory every day, and so do the nurses who saved my life. If we had a security guard on the ward, it wouldn’t have happened.”