Practice Problem: Workplace violence directly contributes to the development of psychological conditions in nurses and reduces nurses’ level of job satisfaction as well as organizational commitment (ANA, 2018). Additionally, the occurrence of workplace violence events impacts patient and organizational outcomes.
PICOT: The PICOT question that guided this project was, in acute-care medical-surgical nurses (P), does the use of a structured risk of violence screening tool (I), compared to current practice (C), improve the nurses’ perceived ability to identify patients who are at risk for becoming violent (O) over eight weeks (T)? Evidence: Evidence that was reviewed supported the implementation of a risk of violence screening tool and appropriate interventions following early identification.
Intervention: The Brøset Violence Checklist was implemented and completed every shift for every patient. If a patient screened out as a high risk for violence, security was notified and completed more frequent rounding.
Outcome: While not statistically significant, it was found that following implementation of this project, the percentage of nurses that rated their feeling safe at work as agree or strongly agree increased from 55% to 73%. Additionally, the percentage of nurses that rated their ability to identify the risk of violence as agree or strongly agree increased from 85% to 93%.
Conclusion: Using a risk of violence screening tool, such as the Brøset Violence Checklist is clinically successful at improving nurse perception of safety and ability to identify the potential risk of violence.