Healthcare professionals working in Swedish hospitals are living in fear as a result of threats and violence from criminal patients and their extended families.

Local media reports that staff caring for gunshot victims, many of whom are criminals and people injured in gang related violence, are threatened with death and rape as patients’ “clans” storm the hospital.

“It has become almost a given in some situations that we will see victims’ relatives charging into the hospital wards and issuing verbal threats to healthcare workers,” said an emergency room nurse working at Vrinnevis Hospital in Norrköping, who wished to remain anonymous.

Surveying 15 of Sweden’s largest hospitals, SVT News said it is “becoming more and more common” that hospital staff see “the mood become threatening” when treating gunshot victims, and patients with connections to gangs or the country’s criminal underworld.

As a result of the threats and violence being spread in Swedish hospitals by gangsters, criminals, and clans, healthcare workers often hide their name badges to conceal their identities, fearing assaults outside of working hours, and even attacks on their families on children.

An SVT piece published earlier this week featuring testimony from hospital staff who deal with gunshot victims, said employees are “afraid to be shot at work”, with patients’ family members arriving “wearing bulletproof vests … and it is unclear whether they are armed”.

“As well as getting death threats from patients and their enemies, staff also have to deal with the relatives and friends of gunshot victims threatening workers with knives, and even threatening to hunt down our children and family members,” one healthcare worker said.

Official Data: Sexual Assault Jumps by 70 Per Cent in Sweden https://t.co/BVBYJrJmH7 pic.twitter.com/zaBOBgGPWS — Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) January 11, 2017

Hospital staff also detailed how family members of gunshot victims would often bring knives and weapons to arm patients in the wards.

“We have taken additional measures to prevent violence, and to protect and ensure the safety of staff and other patients, as a result of the increase in threats and violence that we have seen in recent years,” said Uppsala University Hospital security official, Fredrik Tedenlind.

The hospital reported having had a number of worrying situations take place on its site whilst treating gunshot victims 2016 and 2017, noting it was forced into locking the emergency department’s entrance for a period because of the problems which arose when large numbers of friends and relatives crowded into the hospital’s waiting rooms.

In February, Breitbart London reported on how the leader of a Swedish ambulance drivers’ union said his members need police protection and access to “military” level defensive equipment in response to the levels of aggression paramedics face when entering migrant-dominated “no-go zones”.