Fatal UCSF Stabbing Heightens Concerns About Health Worker Safety

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KQED

News, Politics, News Commentary

4.2 • 726 Ratings

🗓️ 11 December 2025

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The killing of Alberto Rangel, a 51-year-old social worker at San Francisco General Hospital, has left colleagues grieving and questioning whether his death could have been prevented. Rangel was stabbed by a patient who authorities say had made multiple threats for weeks. Incidents of workplace violence in healthcare facilities have been on the rise for more than a decade nationwide, prompting hospitals and medical offices to adopt stricter safety protocols. But are they working? We’ll talk about workplace violence against health care workers and what employers are doing – and failing to do – to protect them. Guests: Annie Vainshtein, reporter, San Francisco Chronicle Dani Golomb, psychiatrist; Golomb was attacked by a patient in 2020 during her medical residency at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco Dan Russell, president, University Professional and Technical Employees Al'ai Alvarez, clinical professor of emergency medicine, Stanford University Cammie Chaumont Menendez, research epidemiologist, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:00.0	Support for KQED podcasts comes from Earth Justice. As the largest environmental law organization in the country,
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0:29.4	supporter at earthjustice.org. Sponsorship of this podcast comes from Stanford Summer Session,
0:36.9	allowing visiting students to study at Stanford for an academic term.
0:40.9	Learn more at summer.standford.edu.
0:45.6	From KQED.
0:47.8	Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal.
0:51.0	The sad truth is that hospitals and therefore hospital workers and anyone around are on the front lines of the intersecting mental health drug and homelessness crises in our cities.
1:04.1	As healthcare workers try to heal people dealing with multiple problems, it can be a volatile mix.
1:10.1	California hospitals have tallied roughly 10,000 violent
1:13.3	incidents each year. 10,000. One of those incidents ended in tragic loss of life at SF
1:21.3	General when social worker Alberto Ranel was stabbed and eventually succumbed to his injuries.
1:27.0	Here to detail what happened, or at least
1:29.8	what we know about what happened. We're joined first by Annie Weinstein, who is the San Francisco
1:35.5	Chronicle Reporter who's been on this incident. Welcome. Thank you so much for having me.
1:40.2	Thanks for joining us. And if you knew Alberto Ranel, we know that he was a luminous figure for a lot of people,
1:46.6	feel free to give us a call. The number is 866736786, or you can send us an email to forum at kQD.org.
1:55.9	If you knew Alberto Ranel, and you want to talk a little bit about him. Annie, for people who haven't been following this instant, just give us kind of like the
2:03.8	broad strokes, you know, ABC, here's what happened.
2:07.3	Yeah.
	...

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