Abstract
Workplace violence in healthcare settings is on the rise, particularly against nurses. Most healthcare violence research is in acute care settings. The purpose of this paper is to present descriptive findings on the prevalence of types and sources of workplace violence among nurses in different roles (i.e., direct care, leader, educator), specialties, care sectors (i.e., acute, community, long-term care) and geographic contexts (i.e., urban, suburban, rural) within the province of British Columbia (BC), Canada. This is a province-wide survey study using a cross-sectional descriptive, correlational design. An electronic survey was emailed by the provincial union to members across the province in Fall 2019. A total of 4462 responses were analyzed using descriptive and chi-square statistics. The most common types of workplace violence were emotional abuse, threats of assault and physical assault for all nursing roles and contexts. Findings were similar to previous BC research from two decades ago except for two to ten times higher proportions of all types of violence, including verbal and physical sexual assault. Patients were the most common source of violence towards nurses. Nurses should be involved in developing workplace violence interventions that are tailored to work environment contexts and populations.
Highlights
Compared to employees in other industries, healthcare workers have a four-fold higher rate of exposure to workplace violence [1]
The majority of workplace violence research has been conducted with direct care nurses from urban acute care settings [4,5,6,7], with limited research on the state of workplace violence among non-direct care providers, such as nursing leaders and educators, and nurses in long-term care or community care sectors and/or healthcare settings across geographical areas
We found differences in the prevalence of various types and sources of workplace violence among nurses across a variety of nursing roles and contexts
Summary
Compared to employees in other industries, healthcare workers have a four-fold higher rate of exposure to workplace violence [1]. The long-term consequences of workplace violence for providers, patients, the healthcare organization and the society at large have been relatively well studied [3], there is a gap in our understanding of different typologies and sources of workplace violence towards nurses across a variety of roles, specialties, sectors and geographical areas. Violence rates in acute care settings have been attributed to the close, frequent contact direct care nurses have with patients and families [2,4,6]. Less is known about violence rates in other healthcare sectors with nurses in roles that require less frequent, direct contact with patients and families.
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