Violence in the Emergency Department:
Tools & Strategies to Create a Violence-Free ED
by Patricia Allen MBA BS RN
From Amazon.com: Violence in the emergency department (ED) is a critical, even life-threatening problem facing ED nurses and physicians daily. ED personnel have repeatedly reported being threatened, harassed, and seriously injured by hostile patients, including psychiatrically ill patients, substance abusers, and criminals, as well as by patients’ families and friends. During this nursing shortage, it is imperative that hospital administrators take the necessary measures to create a violence-free ED.
This book educates health care professionals and hospital administrators about all aspects of ED violence. The author provides all the essential tools and strategies for preventing violence before it starts, and managing it if it occurs. In this book, Allen provides practical guidelines for assessing the potential risk of violence in the ED and implementing a violence defense strategy and program.
Key topics discussed:
- How to assess the potential risk of violence in individual patients
- How to identify the types of patients that are most likely to be violent in the ED and why they are violent
- How to plan and implement a violence defense program by increasing security, charging penalties and fines, announcing hospital-wide alerts, and more
- How to improve communication strategies with both colleagues and violent patients in the ED
- How to increase awareness of the the significant problem of lateral violence among healthcare personnel
- Violence in the Emergency Department will not only help safeguard physicians and nurses from injury, it will serve as one more step toward healing the critical nursing shortage, increasing job satisfaction, and improving patient care.
About the Author
Patricia B. “Nikki” Allen, MBA, BS, RN, has spent her entire career in diverse areas of health care management. She has created a violence prevention plan including violence prevention tools to help the multiple Emergency Departments (EDs) with which she has been involved. Since then, Ms. Allen has become increasingly interested in addressing the explosive but underreported incidence of violence occurring in Emergency Departments across the United States. She has been a regular invited speaker about violence in the Emergency Department at the Leadership Conference of the Emergency Nurses’ Association (ENA). She is passionate about continuing her work in developing strategies to deal with violent individuals, to help protect ED patients, and to help physicians, nurses, and ED staff protect themselves from harm. Ms. Allen’s other passions are her three grown children, her daughter-in-law, and her friends. One of her children is a health care professional in an environment that is high-risk for violence.
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