Nurses Face More Violence Than Ever — Here’s How Hospitals Are Finally Fighting Back
- A 2023 study by the American Hospital Association found 62.1% of nurses in outpatient physician clinics have experience workplace violence.
- Workplace violence costs healthcare systems an estimated $18.27 billion, including $14.65 billion in the aftermath of the violent events.
- Workplace violence costs healthcare systems money, employees, trust, and safety ratings.
Healthcare workers are facing increasing rates of violence . Not just nurses but physicians and ancillary staff too. Increasingly, workers are finding themselves verbally, emotionally, and physically under attack by the patients they are trying to save.
These attacks cost healthcare systems:
- Money
- Employees
- Trust
- Safety ratings
Recently, healthcare systems have stopped tolerating any type of violence against healthcare workers by taking a harder stance. A new editorial piece was recently published by HealthLeaders, highlighting the work that different healthcare systems are doing to combat workplace violence.
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Workplace Violence Prevalence
A recent study found that an astonishing number of healthcare workers employed in outpatient physician clinics have experienced workplace violence. This includes,
- 59% of physicians
- 62% of nurses
- 68% of receptionists
- 40% of technicians
According to the 2023 data compiled in an American Hospital Association report, workplace violence costs hospitals an estimated $18.27 billion. In fact, post-violence events include health care, loss of staffing, and infrastructure repair cost $14.65 billion alone.
Source: OSHA/Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)
The study found that there were multiple additional impacts including,
- Public perception
- Staff recruitment and retention
- Legal concerns
- Job satisfaction
- Psychological harm
“First and foremost, we make sure staff are physically safe after an event,” said Ghazala Sharieff, MD, MBA, chief medical and operations officer of acute care at Scripps Health.
F3EAD Methodology
Scripps Health employs the F3EAD methodology when analyzing workplace violence and post-event debriefings. F3EAD stands for
- Find: Identify risks, hot spots, and repeat offenders.
- Fix: Determine whether a technology, education, or training intervention is needed.
- Finish: Evaluate whether the solution worked.
- Exploit & Analyze: Examine data to determine whether interventions reduced incidents.
- Disseminate: Share lessons learned across the organization.
”It is important to recognize that this is often not a ‘one and done’ situation,” says Juliann Barrett, DO, MBA, CMO of Valley Regional Hospital, which is part of Dartmouth Health. “The emotional sequela of these events might not manifest for days or even weeks after the incident, so even employees who said they were ‘OK’ immediately after an event need longitudinal check-ins.”
Taking Action - Filing Charges
Gone are the days when employees are supposed to keep working after an event. Now, healthcare systems are encouraging healthcare workers to file charges.
“In workplace violence incidents, getting justice for what happened to you is an important part of the healing process,” Todd Walbridge, senior director of safety and security, Scripps Health, said. “This includes filing charges, working with law enforcement, and prosecuting perpetrators.”
Denver Health specifically recommends and encourages its employees to file police charges. According to administrators, if an employee files police charges, the security team, as well as frontline leaders, including nurse managers, work with the employee to provide support in filing the report, as well as ensuring they can have time off to go to court or speak to police.
Learning from an Event
Healthcare administrators are highly encouraged to hold in-person debriefing sessions after an incident of workplace violence. Furthermore, leaders need to ensure that the immediate response to the event is appropriate.
Leaders should be disseminating the information that is learned from the event to other locations and also looking for patterns. For example, do events happen mostly on weekend nightshift in the ER? Is the ER properly staffed with security personnel? If the answer is yes, the events generally occur at that time, then it is the responsibility of the administration to propose possible solutions or stopgaps.
“If an incident occurs at one site, we want to bring the learnings from that incident to other sites and how we can prevent the incident from occurring at another site,” Sharieff says. “You do not want to let an incident slide and wait for another incident to happen.”
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