According to a recent NCCI Report on Violence (summary) (Full Report, PDF), “the majority of workplace assaults are committed by healthcare patients.” While there is good news in the fact that workplace homicides and assaults are on the decline, the NCCI report says this:
“The decline in the rate of workplace assaults has lagged the steady decline in the rate for all lost work-time injuries and illnesses. This reflects a notable change in the composition of the US workforce and, in particular, the ongoing increase in the share of healthcare workers, who experience remarkably high rates of injuries due to assaults by patients. This is especially common in nursing homes and other long-term care facilities. In fact, 61% of all workplace assaults are committed by healthcare patients. For assaults, coworkers make up just 7%, and someone other than a healthcare patient or coworker comprises 23%. The remainder is unspecified.”
In a post last year on healthcare workers and on-the-job violence, we talked about some of the perpetrators:
“While many assaults are by patients, friend and family members of patients also can commit the assaults. There are also rapists or muggers who are targeting healthcare settings or solitary workers; drug addicts and robbers, who are looking for medications; and domestic violence brought into the workplace. And it’s unclear why violence is on the rise. Many point to staff shortages. Others see the preponderance of alcohol, drugs, and ready access to weapons as contributing factors; others think that hospital administrators do too little in the area of prevention.”
In the list above, we overlooked a huge and growing segment: elderly patients, patients with Alzheimer’s, and people suffering from mental illness.
Prevention Tools
OSHA: Guidelines for Preventing Workplace Violence for Health Care & Social Service Workers. See also the slide show overview version
The Emergency Nurses’ Association has issued a good Workplace Violence Toolkit.
We also found that WorkSafeBC has put together a series of excellent short video clips for various health care settings.
Tags: assaults, home healthcare, nursing, residential care, violence
