Prevalence of Workplace Violence in Psychiatric Wards, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

Workplace violence is still a problem that nurses may be exposed to in clinical wards. A psychiatric ward is among the most probable one confronting this violence. This study determined the workplace violence in psychiatric wards in Tehran, Iran. Nurses working in Razi Psychiatric Center, Tehran, Iran were enrolled using the International Workplace Violence questionnaire. Among 385 nurses of this ward, 200 subjects completed the questionnaire using a simple random sampling method with a response rate of 91.5%. The prevalence of workplace violence was 71% including mental (93.4%) and physical violence (71.6%). Verbal and sexual violence occurred in 19.1 and 5.5% of subjects, respectively. The 62.3% of the nurses did not report violence because they considered it useless (55.3%) or did not believe to be important (42.1%). The 61.2% believed to the necessity of training courses while 72.7% had completed these courses and 59.6% believed to a reporting system. The need to security guard (56.8%), taking security actions in wards (67.8%) and training of staffs (68.9%) were the most important preventive measures reported to be effective for workplace violence. It seems that training courses, establishing rules to prevent workplace violence, reporting systems, compensating losses from violence, increasing the security at workplace, increasing the number of nurses and providing especial guiding protocols against any workplace violence would promote the wards to control the workplace violence against nurses.

Factors Influencing Violence Experienced by Medical Staff in Primary Health Care Centers, Taif City.

“…The majority of perpetrators of violence were the patients themselves followed by relatives/friends or visitors. These results are similar to those reported in the literature (Algwaiz &Alghanim, 2012, andKhoshknab et al, 2012), which indicated that when people are exposed to critical health conditions and are transferred to hospitals for medical intervention, they and their relatives or friends have high levels of stress and feelings of anger and frustration which in turn, might bemanifested in the use of violence against others, possibly healthcare providers (Rehmani, 2004, andAbuAlRub et al, 2007). According to Kwok et al (2006) patients and their relatives were the main perpetrators in all cases.…”

Nurses exposure to workplace violence in a large teaching hospital in Iran

“…As expected, verbal abuse (69%) followed by bullying and mobbing (29%) and physical violence (12%) were the most commonly reported types of violence. Previous studies that had taken place in Iran reported similar trends such as: 72% of nurses in a hospital experienced verbal abuse in Tabriz over the course of a year, 87% in a hospital in Tehran and 95% in a hospital in Mazandaran (4,6,10,26,(28)(29)(30). All of these suggest that a coherent program to provide support for nurses (and other staff) and prevent workplace violence is essential and should be considered a priority.…”

Inpatient aggression in community hospitals

“…4,5 Of particular concern, evidence suggests that violent incidents are underreported. 6 Figure 1 lists some of the factors that may result in failure by staff to report a violent incident.…”