Nurses at Regina's General Hospital are shaken up after one their own was attacked and robbed.
Karly Simpson, who works in the neonatal intensive care unit at Regina General Hospital, says a co-worker was leaving around midnight Thursday.
A man followed her to her car and hit her when she got in.
Family members of a patient who were driving by heard her honking and they scared him off.
The man stole her purse.
Regina police describe the suspect as between 25 and 30, with a dark complexion and is five feet, eight inches tall, wearing a black or grey toque, blue jeans and a black and brown jacket.
It's not the first time a hospital worker has been approached after leaving work. Simpson said another co-worker was followed to her parked car by the hospital around two months ago. When Simpson was pregnant she was leaving work and was approached while walking to her car.
"When I was approached there was four of them, there was nothing I was going to be able to do. But luckily they were mostly just joking but I mean it still puts you in a precarious situation where you're real nervous and have nowhere to go."
Nurses raised the issue of parking and safety last year and Regina Qu'Appelle Health Region responded by making security available to walk staff to their car. But Simpson said that hasn't solved the problem.
"There's not enough of them to walk all of us out in the dark and at this time of the year we're coming in the dark and we're leaving in the dark, if you're working either shift."
Staff can be bused to the hospital from two different parking lots in the city, but Simpson said the bus doesn't run all day and night. For people who live out of Regina, it adds more travelling time to an already long work day that could be 12 to 13 hours.
Simpson said some nurses have chosen to move downtown so they could walk to the General Hospital and avoid the parking problems all together.
"Now even those ones are scared of doing that because now they're walking through the same path that this girl was attacked on," Simpson said.
The hospital has no parkade and nurses have to park in two-hour-limit zones around the hospital.
"It's hard to focus on your job when you're worried about if you're a) getting a bunch of tickets or b) going to make it home to your family at night. That's the part that's scary to me," Simpson said.
(CJME)
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