Health-care worker stabbed by patient at St. Paul's Hospital: Vancouver police

Charges are possible after a patient stabbed a staff member at a downtown Vancouver hospital, police say.

In a brief message on social media, police said the stabbing happened at St. Paul's Hospital on Tuesday morning.

It was reported that a 35-year-old man had been admitted to the hospital.

He then pulled out a knife and stabbed a hospital worker as he was led to his room, officers said.

No further details were provided about the case, other than that the Vancouver Police Department is recommending charges against the patient.

News of the stabbing came a day after police used Twitter to alert the public to a total of 60 assaults reported in the city over the Family Day long weekend.

The VPD provided details on only six of those assaults, but said about one-third were so-called "stranger" attacks, meaning the suspect and victim were not known to each other.

Experts are questioning the department's approach to the sudden increase in stranger assaults over the last several months.

Prior to the weekend, the department said Vancouver was seeing an average of about four assaults a day, though another officer later said the VPD gets about 12 calls about assaults per day.

Over the three-day weekend, there was an average of 20 attacks a day.

Const. Tania Visintin said the spike in assaults over the weekend was not unexpected – there was an influx of people in the downtown area after COVID-19 restrictions on bars and nightclubs were lifted.

Police say their strategy to combat the increase in assaults, especially those committed by strangers, is a greater police presence in the affected areas, but it's a strategy not everyone agrees with.

"Do they think they can really just be at the right address or on the right block within the right time frame to end up preventing a crime?" a criminology professor from Simon Fraser University questioned during an interview with CTV News.

"They might get lucky, but I don't see how an increased police presence, unless they're going to be radically increasing the police budget, which would not be something I think the public would support right now is going to, it's really going to do much," Martin Andresen said.

He mentioned mental health care and housing are better solutions than more officers on the streets.

These issues were also noted by police in an interview with CTV earlier this month. 

With files from CTV News Vancouver's Regan Hasegawa and Travis Prasad