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This study provides knowledge of how abused women experience the care provided at a general psychiatric clinic after the disclosure of abuse.

BackgroundExperiences of abuse are common among women in general psychiatric care. Even so, there are to our knowledge no previous national or international studies exploring disclosure in a general psychiatric setting of female patient’s experiences of abuse to staff or to formal and informal networks.This study aimed to explore women’s disclosure of experiencing physical, emotional and/or sexual abuse during their most recent contact with staff at a general psychiatric clinic. The study also aimed to determine whether the women have previously disclosed abuse to anyone.MethodsA consecutive sampling of eligible female patients at a general psychiatric clinic in an urban area of southern Sweden answered the NorVold Abuse Questionnaire, NorAQ, a self-administrated questionnaire. NorAQ has previously been used and further developed to compare the prevalence of abuse in women present in gynecological outpatient settings in the five Nordic countries. Seventy-seven women with experiences of abuse participated in the research. Descriptive statistics were used to analyse the data.ResultsMost respondents did not disclose their experiences of abuse to staff at the general psychiatric clinic. Women with experiences of physical abuse (n = 40), emotional abuse (n = 37) and sexual abuse (n = 37) chose not to disclose their experiences. Respondents disclosed abuse more often to others than to staff.ConclusionsOur findings indicated the importance of including routine questions concerning abuse experiences as a natural part of female patients’ medical history.

Aim:The aims of the study are to explore workplace violence perpetrated by patients or visitors from the perspective of hospital ward managers and to describe how ward managers perceive their leadership role and manage related incidents.Background: Few studies focus on workplace violence from the perspective of ward managers even though they are the closest managers to the operational staff.Method: Fifteen semistructured interviews were analysed using qualitative content analysis.Results: Four categories emerged: the face of workplace violence, a two-fold assignment, strive towards readiness to act, and managing incidents. Conclusion:While the most common acts of workplace violence are considered less serious and related to patients' medical conditions or dissatisfied visitors, hospital organizations focus on serious but rarely occurring incidents. Consequently, ward managers have limited opportunities to ensure a safe work environment on an everyday basis.Implications for nursing management: To support ward managers' occupational safety and health management, workplace violence prevention and management should be acknowledged as an important responsibility for senior management in hospitals. It is important to identify incidents that most likely will occur at the wards and to create strategies related to those incidents. Strategies could include risk assessments, prevention, evaluation, education and reflection combined with, for example, scenario training.

Violence against women is a major global public health issue, and experiencing violence has substantial consequences for the lives of abused women. This study aims to illustrate experiences of abuse and its influence on mental ill health among women seeking general psychiatric care. Ten women seeking general psychiatric care in southern Sweden participated in a qualitative interview study. Content analysis resulted in four categories: Living in fear that persistently influences the substance of life, living with the sense of being worthless, living with a constant question about who you are and living between hope and despair. The theme evolving from the analysis was: Being vulnerable and without protection in a frightful reality that limits one's possibilities of living and being the person one wishes to be. The results showed that the women described their mental ill health not only in terms of depression, anxiety and suicidal ideation and self-harm, but also in relation to feelings of hope and despair, fear, worthlessness and living with a constant question about who they are. The abuse reduces freedom of action, and leads to feelings of insecurity, of not having any boundaries, isolation, and self-contempt and a need to escape. This study provides knowledge of abused women self-reported mental ill health in relation to abuse.

Background. Though workplace violence (WPV) is a global problem for healthcare professionals, research within in-hospital care has mainly focused on WPV in emergency healthcare settings. Thus, the number of qualitative studies that explores experiences of WPV in general hospital wards with a longer length of stay is limited. Aim. The aim of this study was to explore how healthcare professionals in surgical hospital wards experience and manage WPV perpetrated by patients or visitors. Method. The study applied a qualitative, inductive approach using focus group interviews for data collection. A purposeful sample of 16 healthcare professionals working in surgical wards was included. Data were analysed using a thematic analysis. Findings. The analysis resulted in four main themes: workplace violence characteristics, partly predictable yet not prevented, approaching workplace violence, and consequences from workplace violence. During the focus group interviews, the healthcare professionals described various acts of physical violence, verbal abuse, and gender discrimination perpetrated by patients or their visitors. Despite the predictability of some of the incidents, preventive strategies were absent or inadequate, with the healthcare professionals not knowing how to react in these threatful or violent situations. They experienced that WPV could result in negative consequences for the care of both the threatful or violent person and the other patients in the ward. WPV caused the healthcare professionals to feel exposed, scared, and unprotected. Conclusion and clinical implications. Exposure to WPV is a problem for healthcare professionals in surgical wards and has consequences for the patients. Preventive strategies, guidelines, and action plans are urgently needed to minimise the risk of WPV and to ensure a safe work and care environment.

It is evident that healthcare professionals should deepen their understanding of how abused women live, within a general psychiatric context. This study enables a deeper understanding of abused women's vulnerability in relation to how the abuse and encounters with healthcare professionals affect life.

BackgroundThe nurse’s primary task in psychiatric care should be to plan for the patient’s care in cooperation with the patient and spend the time needed to build a relationship. Psychiatric care nurses however claim that they lack the necessary time to communicate with patients. To investigate the validity of such claims, this time-motion study aimed at identifying how nurses working at inpatient psychiatric wards distribute their time between a variety of tasks during a working day.MethodsDuring the period of December 2015 and February 2016, a total of 129 h and 23 min of structured observations of 12 nurses were carried out at six inpatient wards at one psychiatric clinic in southern Sweden. Time, frequency of tasks and number of interruptions were recorded and analysed using descriptive statistics.ResultsAdministering drugs or medications accounted for the largest part of the measured time (17.5%) followed by indirect care (16%). Relatively little time was spent on direct care, the third largest category in the study (15.3%), while an unexpectedly high proportion of time (11.3%) was spent on ward related tasks. Nurses were also interrupted in 75% of all medication administering tasks.ConclusionsNurses working in inpatient psychiatric care spend little time in direct contact with the patients and medication administration is interrupted very often. As a result, it is difficult to establish therapeutic relationships with patients. This is an area of concern for both patient safety and nurses’ job satisfaction.