Incident Prevention
Programs aimed at preventing violence can reduce these incidents.
“How well prepared hospital workers are in dealing with violent situations depends on the workplace violence prevention program implemented at a facility,” the OSHA spokesperson says. “Some states have passed legislation that specifically requires workplace violence prevention programs in the healthcare setting.”
These programs should address management commitment and employee participation, worksite analysis, hazard prevention and control, safety and health training, and recordkeeping and program evaluation. These elements should be assessed regularly, with changes made to respond to changing conditions, OSHA says.
A large number of OSHA inspections in the healthcare setting occur because of complaints regarding lack of protections against workplace violence. In 2014, the agency did 35 inspections in response to such complaints; 25 of those were in a healthcare setting, with 12 specifically at hospitals. As a result, five citations were issued, all of which were in healthcare, including two at hospitals.
Last year, Brookdale University Hospital and Medical Center in Brooklyn, N.Y., was fined $78,000 after an OSHA inspection found 40 incidents of workplace violence between Feb. 7 and April 12. They included employees who were threatened or verbally or physically assaulted by patients and visitors or while breaking up fights between patients. In the worst attack, a nurse sustained severe brain injuries.
The bulk of the hospital’s fines came as a result of a willful violation—an intentional or voluntary disregard for laws meant to protect workers against hospital violence.
While data from IAHSS and the BLS show an increase in hospital violence, those national figures aren’t as important as what is happening at your own facility, says David LaRose, MS, CHPA, CPP, the president of IAHSS and director of safety, security, and emergency management at Lakeland Regional Medical Center in Florida.
“You have to do a vulnerability assessment, and you specifically have to look at your demographic,” he says. “You specifically have to look at what is the history and the culture of the facility” to determine a hospital’s specific risk factors.
Although it’s crucial that a hospital track its own statistics on violence, that’s not to say that incidents elsewhere are irrelevant.
“You also want to look at what’s happening in the real world,” he says. “Somebody else’s unfortunate (occurrence) is a learning experience for my system, so we can try to be proactively preventing that.”
Educate, Recognize, React
At Nemours, Dr. Pressel didn’t develop the training in response to a perceived rise in incidents there. It was apparent, he says, that deficiencies in readiness needed to be addressed.
In the Nemours program, every staff member with some level of patient care responsibility gets basic training in aggressive child emergencies: identifying these situations, responding appropriately, and keeping safe. This group includes doctors, nurses, and nurse’s aids. The training involves actually playing out scenarios of violence, with staff members attempting to subdue a would-be attacker.
Depending on the job, each worker receives extra training that is specific to the role he or she would play in handling violent scenarios.
The training is designed to help individuals respond to such situations with “the same alacrity and acuity as they would respond to a Code Blue,” Dr. Pressel says. “Drop what you’re doing and run. These events are dangerous. That’s what they teach people. They’re dangerous and they’re scary and they’re chaotic, just like a Code Blue. That’s how people need to treat it.”