'What the hell are we doing here?' Inside Canada's shockingly violent hospitals

Alarming rise of assaults, stabbings, shootings and machete attacks have made work a living hell for doctors and nurses

By Sharon Kirkey Published Mar 18, 2025

After the sixth blow to her head, Natasha Poirier stopped counting.

She felt certain she was going to die. “He is here to hurt me, and hurt me badly,” she remembered thinking before slumping to the floor on her knees.

Her attacker would later claim he’d blacked out, that he couldn’t remember a thing except high-pitched screams, a defence the judge in his criminal trial rejected.

Her attacker would later claim he’d blacked out, that he couldn’t remember a thing except high-pitched screams, a defence the judge in his criminal trial rejected.

He was angry, New Brunswick Provincial Court judge Yvette Finn would rule, he was aware of what he was doing “and simply did not care.”

One mid-afternoon in March 2019, Poirier, then a nurse manager in the fourth-floor surgical unit at Dr. Georges-L.-Dumont University Hospital Centre in Moncton, N.B., was cornered in her office and beaten by Bruce Randolph “Randy” Van Horlick in a wholly unexpected, unprovoked and vicious assault, “a flagrant and outrageous assertion of power” over an innocent victim, as noted by one judge in a summary of the case.

“We’re made to think we’re not good caregivers because we get assaulted. We’re blamed. There’s a fear of judgment, retaliation, losing our jobs and being seen as weak. People … just suffer in silence,” says Natasha Poirier, whose service dog, Harvey, helps her cope with PTSD since she was attacked by a patient’s husband in March 2019. Photo by Stephen MacGillivray/The National Post 

Van Horlick, 69 at the time and twice Poirier’s weight, was unhappy that his wife had been moved from a quiet room down the hall to a room closer to the nurses’ station when he went looking for Poirier.

Read more at the National Post