Tasmania's premier Jeremy Rockliff says the condition of a senior doctor allegedly stabbed while working in the emergency department at Tasmania's North West Regional Hospital (NWRH) is improving.
A 17-year-old has been charged in relation to Sunday's alleged attack and was due to appear in the Burnie Youth Justice Court on Monday.
The charges include wounding and two counts of threatening police.
Police were called to the NWRH in Burnie, on the state's north-west coast, following reports a medical professional had been wounded on Sunday afternoon.
Australian Medical Association Tasmania (AMA) president Dr John Saul said a male doctor was "significantly injured" during the incident.
"It's our understanding that one of our senior doctors was the victim of a violent incident at the Emergency Department," he said.
"It appears that it was some sort of wounding, most likely a stabbing."
The doctor was airlifted to the Royal Hobart Hospital (RHH) where he is in a critical but stable condition.
A youth was arrested shortly after the incident.
"Staff at the NWRH handled the situation incredibly well, performed exceptionally well in saving this man's life," Dr Saul said.
"This is tough when it happens to a colleague. It's tough when you have to perform the immediate medical treatment on a colleague.
"It is incredibly hard to be saving the life of a colleague in this situation."
Dr Saul said he was confident the man would survive.
"That would be thanks to the excellent performance of the NWRH staff and the life-saving surgery at the RHH," he said.
"You expect to go to a workplace in safety but sadly patient aggression and violence does happen in our emergency departments. It is sadly part of the course of our work.
"We were saddened that this could occur in a place of a healing, a place where people go to get help."
Dr Saul said the Department of Health had already made counselling available to staff, while the AMA's Drs4Drs service was also able to help.
"You just never know when you might need these services. It might be on the first day after an incident, it might be at the end of the first week, it might be months down the track," he said.
Mr Rockliff said he had spoken to the family of the "well-respected" doctor and his condition was improving.
"We can only hope and pray that the recovery of course continues, and we see improvement day in and day out from here," he said.
"But our thoughts and best wishes are with the family at this very traumatic and worrying time."
Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation's Emily Shepherd said several staff had witnessed the incident, and called on more to be done to protect healthcare workers.
"It's incredibly concerning and really distressing," she said.
"Our members go to work to provide care, treatment and healing. They intend to go to work and come home to their families.
"Many of our members are having to deal with violence and aggression in the workplace, and we are keen to see additional supports put in to prevent these sorts of incident and ensure healthcare workers are kept as safe as possible."
Union call for security to be 'in-house'
Robbie Moore from the Health and Community Services Union said increasing violence in hospitals was driving medical staff out of areas like emergency and psychiatric medicine.
"Certainly people ask to be moved to areas where they're less likely to come across this kind of situation," he said.
"A key thing we've been talking about for some time is the need to bring security at the hospital back in-house. It's currently outsourced, so you have security that just isn't trained for this environment.
"Straight away, the government could ensure we have appropriate security at our hospitals so we don't get weapons coming through the hospital doors in the first place."
Mr Rockliff said security measures would be reviewed as part of a critical incident response that the government had initiated.
He said that would include consulting with unions representing health care workers.
"We'll be bringing together all those stakeholders to see what improvements we can make and need to be made, and any [lessons] from this critical incident [on how] we can improve and bolster security in the interest of the safety, for not only our health professionals, but our patients as well," he said.
He said security staff were stationed in all Tasmanian public hospitals, but any ways to improve current arrangements would be considered.
Tasmania Police described the incident as isolated and said there was no threat to the wider community.
