Workplace violence continues to rear its ugly head

Nineteen weeks later in the pregnancy, Boreham, who asked that her hospital not be named, was punched in the face by an unstable mentally ill teenage patient. She was knocked unconscious, had two bones broken and wasn’t able to work for a week. Both incidents happened in the ED, but workplace violence against nurses can happen in a variety of settings and can come from patients, patients’ family members and even co-workers. The incidents include everything from verbal assaults, spitting, hitting, hair pulling, shoving and throwing, to gun violence and killing. Nurses are the largest sector of the healthcare workforce and interact with patients more than other providers. Healthcare workers have a much higher risk for serious workplace violence (resulting in workers taking time off to recuperate) than workers in other sectors. According to an Occupational Health and Safety Administration report, from 2002 to 2013, serious workplace violence was four times more common in healthcare settings than in private industry on average.

In 2013, the healthcare and social assistance sector had 7.8 cases of serious violence per 10,000 full-time employees. In comparison, construction and manufacturing each had fewer than 2 cases per 10,000 employees, according to OSHA. And the numbers showed an uptick in recent years, with a showing violence against nurses increased steadily between 2012 and 2014. In a study published in 2014 in the , in a community/urban hospital system with more than 5,000 nurses, 76% of nurses reported they experienced violence in the previous year (verbal abuse by patients, 54.2%; physical abuse by patients, 29.9%; verbal abuse by visitors, 32.9%; and physical abuse by visitors, 3.5%.) “Emergency nurses experienced a significantly greater number of incidents,” the study found.

Prevention instead of prosecution

Nurses still love helping people despite the violence

Despite the incidents she endured, Allison Boreham, who has been a nurse for 12 years, said it hasn’t changed the way she feels about patients or her work. “I love being able to help people,” she said. “They still need help. Some are not themselves; they’re off their medication and they don’t know what they’re doing.” She said she calls security for backup more these days and feels nervous when entering certain rooms. But she doesn’t see an easy fix for workplace violence. “I can’t see that any steps would have prevented my attacks,” she said. “If you do more to protect nurses, you’re going to take more rights away from the patients.” She said many of the problems in her experience stem from mentally ill patients off their medication. “They still have rights to refuse medication,” she said. “We can’t hold them down and force it on them. Nobody wants to restrain a patient, because that won’t help the situation.”