Abstract
Workplace violence (WPV) in healthcare settings has drawn attention for over 20 years, yet few studies have investigated the association between WPV and psychological consequences. Here, we used a cross-sectional design to investigate (1) the 12-month prevalence of workplace violence (WPV), (2) the characteristics of WPV, and (3) the relationship between WPV and burnout/secondary traumatic stress among 599 mental healthcare nurses (including assistant nurses) from eight hospitals. Over 40% of the respondents had experienced WPV within the past 12 months. A multivariate logistic regression analysis indicated that occupation and burnout were each significantly related to WPV. Secondary traumatic stress was not related to WPV. Our results suggest that WPV may be a long-lasting and/or cumulative stressor rather than a brief, extreme horror experience and may reflect specific characteristics of psychological effects in psychiatric wards. A longitudinal study measuring the severity and frequency of WPV, work- and non-work-related stressors, risk factors, and protective factors is needed, as is the development of a program that helps reduce the psychological burden of mental healthcare nurses due to WPV.
Highlights
Workplace violence (WPV) is defined as any incident in which a person is abused, threatened, or assaulted in circumstances related to their work; this can include verbal abuse and threats as well as physical attacks [1,2]
We focused on mental healthcare nurses because there have been few investigations of the association between WPV and psychological consequences
We considered the fact that burnout and secondary traumatic stress were clearly separated as subscales to be an advantage in the present study
Summary
Workplace violence (WPV) is defined as any incident in which a person is abused, threatened, or assaulted in circumstances related to their work; this can include verbal abuse and threats as well as physical attacks [1,2]. Workplace violence (WPV) in healthcare settings has been drawing attention for over 20 years [2,4,5,6,7,8] and has been reported in many places, including Europe [9], Asia [10,11,12], the U.S [13], and the Middle East [14]. Female nurses were reported to be the victims of verbal abuse more often than male nurses, and male nurses were reported to be more commonly the victims of physical abuse [7].
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