Violence in Health Care 

By Michael Vallez, RN, BSN, MS 

There is a growing problem of physical violence against healthcare workers. I will focus on nurses. Every experienced nurse has a story of an aggressive, verbally, or physically abusive patient. Despite increase efforts to mitigate violence in healthcare, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows violence has increased over time. Statistics on private healthcare and social assistance industry workers show that violent incidents rose from 6.4 per 10,000 in 2011 to 10.4 per 10,000 in 2018. According to the CDC, “This places healthcare workers at a risk of assault requiring time off from work that is almost 5 times greater than the overall workforce. As astonishing as these numbers are, they do not include psychological trauma from verbal assaults in the healthcare setting or less severe physical assaults that do not require time off from work. Additionally, underreporting of patient on worker assaults is reported in the literature as very common among healthcare workers and nurses in particular.”   

Since this is a national problem, at AUHS, I try to prepare our students to prevent any assault on our students. I am the lead mental health instructor for the BSN nursing program; the mental health class spends an entire 8 hours on the first week of the quarter in “bootcamp.”  This intensive training, which is accomplished by case studies with videos, SIM, and lecture, is given to the students before entering the clinical setting. The purpose is to make the students hyper-aware of violence prevention and prevent any injury to our students.  In addition, students are given a significant portion of time to express their concerns and questions.