Workplace violence in federal agencies.

Abstract

Violent encounters that result in time loss from work or workers' compensation claims may be particularly good benchmarks for tracking workplace violence. Tracking is possible because such events are workplace related, records are available and convenient to study, cases of serious health outcomes are defined already, useful information is available on the occurrence of the event, and individual records are relatively complete. Such records can offer useful impressions about the peculiarities in the frequency of workplace violence in a population.In fiscal year (FY) 1993, 2,185 cases involving fatal and nonfatal human violence were opened and recorded by the Office of Workers' Compensation Programs (OWCP) within the Department of Labor. These cases involved employees in approximately 30 different departments and agencies of the federal government. The highest case rates occurred in the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Transportation. Eleven fatalities were recorded; the highest case fatality rate occurred in the Department of Treasury. Fatalities also occurred in the Department of Labor and the Department of Justice and in the United States Postal Service. Of the total number of cases involving workplace violence, 1,222 cases involved "time lost from work." The highest rates of cases of time lost from work occurred in the Department of Justice and the Department of Veterans Affairs (U.S. Department of Labor, 1993). Preliminary information for FY 1994 shows similar findings. In FY 1994, a total of 7 fatalities occurred in the Departments of the Army, Justice, Treasury, and Labor (US. Department of Labor, 1994). In both years, cases were filed almost equally by sex, although for some occupations one or the other sex predominated.

Integrating research and practice in federal law enforcement: Secret Service applications of behavioral science expertise to protect the President

“…Similarly a brief review of the psychological and behavioral literature on workplace violence indicates considerable research published since 1994 (see e.g., VandenBos & Bulatao, 1996), with virtually no studies cited in the literature prior to 1991. Topics include issues of violence in particular work settings (e.g., Dignam & Fagan, 1996;Freeman, Fox, Burr, & Santasine, 1996;Shazer, 1996), causes of workplace violence (e.g., Baron & Neuman, 1996), and legal issues (Bernat, 1994;Painter, 1991). Various articles have explored prevention and intervention strategies (e.g., Bush & O'Shea, 1996;Nicoletti & Spooner, 1996), but no evaluation research was found examining the eectiveness of prevention and intervention models in responding to and reducing the incidence of targeted violence in the workplace.…”

Aggression at the service delivery interface: Do you see what I see?

“…According to Kingma (2001), healthcare workers are 16 times more likely to experience violent assaults than any other service workers. In a review of violence in federal agencies based on 1993 Office of Workers Compensa-tion Plan data, Freeman, Fox, Burr and Santasine (1996) found that the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) had one of the highest rates of fatal and nonfatal assaults of all federal agencies and that the targets tended to be nursing staff and police. Thus, what is clear is that the healthcare service delivery interface is a fertile one for hostile interactions.…”