Workplace violence is a major concern for every profession. From the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), workplace violence is defined as “violent acts (including physical assaults and threats of assaults) directed toward persons at work or on duty”. Given the scope of workplace violence, the American Psychiatric Nurses Association (APNA), acknowledges that workplace violence is a persistent professional issue for all the registered nurses (APNA, 2016). In particular, the psychiatric nurses stand a greater risk of facing workplace violence due to the category of patients that they handle. Despite the variation in settings, there is abundance of clarity on the fact that violence at work is a substantial health hazard in the occupation of nursing. As the evidence base continues to rapidly improve with accompanying reports that underline the effectiveness of different techniques of managing risk, it is necessary to have apt measures in place to discourage workplace violence. Nonetheless, obstacles to successfully addressing the menace of workplace violence stubbornly remain. As the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) outlines, these obstacles comprise of; unreliable legal and supervisory safeguards, broadly changing programs for violence prevention, harboring the notion that violence is a portion of the job, and the lack of consistent functional descriptions that prevents monitoring and benchmarking.
Data from OSHA, 2015 points out that from the year 2002 up to the year 2013, occurrences of severe violence in the workplace that required the injured workers to take days off for recuperation had gone up to four times in the healthcare setting as compared to other industries. From the classification on OSHA, 2015 the category of violence that affects nurses is the type II violence where the caregivers, including nurses, are largely the victims. As OSHA, 2015 points out, at least 80 percent of workplace violence in 2013 involving incidences of serious violence in healthcare settings were as a result of nurse-patient interactions. In the type III category, workplace violence takes place among workers and may take different forms. One of the forms is the vertical dimension where the senior workers perpetrate violence against the junior workers. The opposite may take place where the junior staff perpetrate violence against the staff in authority. OSHA, 2015 citing a study conducted by Sofield & Salmond outlines the perpetrators of verbal abuse against nurses at the workplace where physicians lead followed by the patients and the families of the patients. As such, they assert that senior managers and high rank professionals such as physicians perpetrate a significant proportion of the overall workplace violence.
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Further, directly working with persons whose past is tainted with violence, drug and substance abuse or alcohol and other unruly behavior pose a significant risk for workplace violence. Similarly, a nurse operating alone in a large section of the facility or in home based care has an increased risk of encountering violence as compared to counterparts in dissimilar situations (Al-Ali et al., 2016). The workplace environment also contributes to violence where the design could prevent the ability of an employee to escape from an incident that posed violence against the individual. On the other hand, healthcare settings without the means of making emergency communications do not discourage workplace violence.
From the APNA position statement on workplace violence, strategies that are based on evidence must be fulfilled to proactively look into the fatigue experienced by nurses. This is to stimulate the wellness, safety and health of the registered nurse as a means of ensuring optimum patient outcomes and the reduction of workplace violence (APNA, 2016) . As such, the relevance of the statement cuts across to all the stakeholders and providers of health care who work in partnership to come up with a healthy and safe inter-professional environment for work. The stakeholders who command some level of influence over the healthcare setting have the obligation to ensure that policies are enacted to reduce the risk of workplace violence or other related risks.
On its part, the OSHA provides regulations pertaining to workplace violence and organizational policies. Essentially, the organization has the mandate of ensuring that their employees are free from all safety hazards that may cause serious injury to the employees. From this point of view, it is interpreted that organizations have to come up with feasible methods of abating the potential hazards in a workplace. Moreover, if any employee has experienced violence at the workplace or is aware of intimidation, threats or other signs of violence at the workplace, they have the right to initiate programs for preventing violence at the workplace. As such, the organization should provide the needed resources for making the program successful, including organizing training for incorporating everyone into the program for preventing workplace violence. In designing the program for preventing violence, the focus should be on coming up with procedures and methods that are suitable for the given workplace.
Since the workplace in question is a healthcare setting, the goals and aims of the violence prevention program need to focus on the scope of the healthcare setting. All the measures put in place should be appropriate for the complexity and scope of operations. Firstly, the management needs to demonstrate their commitment through various deliberate actions while the employee have to participate in the implementation of policies (Al-Ali et al., 2016). Secondly, there has to be continuous analysis of the worksite to identify any new safety hazards. In third comes the prevention and control of the identified hazards to promote safety. The fourth step involves training on the utilization of the safety measures in place while the fifth and the final step is the reporting followed by keeping records of all instances of workplace violence (Al-Ali et al., 2016). With these measures, the workplace is massively enhanced.
References
Al-Ali, N. M., Al Faouri, I., & Al-Niarat, T. F. (2016). The impact of training program on nurses' attitudes toward workplace violence in Jordan. Applied nursing research , 30, 83-89.
American Psychiatric Nurses Association (2016). Workplace Violence Position Statement. Retrieved on August 15, 2017 https://www.apna.org/m/pages.cfm?pageID=3786
Occupational Safety and Health Administration. (2015). Guidelines for preventing workplace violence for heatlhcare and social service workers (OSHA 3148-04R 2015).
