Nurses say violence 'part of the job' | Workplace Violence News

AU: Nurses say violence ‘part of the job’

Posted by Ross Arrowsmith on Wednesday, February 3rd 2010 under Healthcare Violence

More than half of nurses are attacked while tending to patients and more than 90 per cent are verbally abused, a report has found.

The report also says most nurses fail to formally disclose the incidents because they believe violence and abuse come with the job.

A study of 113 nurses, published in the Journal of Clinical Nursing, shows three-quarters of those providing private and public care suffer workplace violence.

But research team leader Rose Chapman, from Perth’s Curtin University of Technology, said only one in six incidents were taken further because many nurses felt workplace violence “was just part of the job”.

Within the study group, which comprised mostly female nurses aged in their early 40s, 92 per cent said they had been verbally abused, 69 per cent had been physically threatened and 52 per cent had been physically assaulted.

In total, 2354 incidents were reported to the research team, with nurses facing an average of two to 46 incidents a year.

Dr Chapman said the 113 nurses had an average service of just under 18 years, with about two-thirds working part-time.

A quarter of the nurses were abused on average once a week, 27 per cent every month and 25 per cent every six months.

The remainder had not experienced any violence.

The number and nature of incidents varied depending on what department the nurses worked in.

Incidents were most frequent in the emergency department, where staff reported an average of 46 incidents over the previous year, and in mental health, where the average was 40 incidents.

The incident rate fell dramatically among midwives and surgical and paediatric staff, to levels as low as two incidents a year.

Forty per cent of staff said they had been involved in an incident with a weapon, with three per cent saying this was a weekly occurrence.

Weapons used in these incidents, which were more common to emergency and mental health facilities, included guns and knives. Hospital equipment was also used to attack staff.

Despite experiencing more problems, nurses working in emergency departments were even less likely to report incidents than staff in other areas, Dr Chapman said.

“The nurses in our study were reluctant to report episodes of workplace violence unless they considered the event to be serious,” Dr Chapman said.

“This finding was supported by a retrospective audit of the hospitals formal incident reports, which showed that 96 per cent of the reporting nurses had received one or more injuries as the result of a violent incident in the workplace.”

Dr Chapman said understanding why nurses do or do not report incidents is important, since this could help educators and administrators develop programs that help reduce workplace violence.

“Further research on how individuals adapt to violence in the workplace is also warranted,” she said.