Violence against doctors, a serious concern for healthcare organizations to ponder about

Abstract

BackgroundAggression and Violence against primary care physicians is reportedly common in Pakistan but there is no any documented study to-date on this burning issue.MethodsA formed written questionnaire was distributed among 769 primary care physicians aged 31 ± 7.68 years. Apart from the demographic data, the questionnaire included questions regarding the level of safety that primary care physicians felt during their work setups and on-call duties, along with the experience of aggression against them by the perpetrators & the support provided by the hospital management in such cases.ResultResponse rate was 68% i.e. 524 physicians agreed to participate in the study. It was found that majority (85%) of the physicians has faced mild events, 62% have faced moderate events and roughly 38% were subjected to severe violence. Some physicians revealed more than one form of aggression being faced by them in 12 months preceding months which makes the collective percentage greater than 100%. Verbal abuse is the most frequent type of mistreatment faced by the doctors from the patients or their attendants.ConclusionA considerable number of physicians participated have faced mild violence in which verbal abuse was commonest; followed by moderate and severe events.

Addressing Risks of Violence against Healthcare Staff in Emergency Departments: The Effects of Job Satisfaction and Attachment Style

“…Our study reports different types of violence that healthcare workers experience on a regular basis. In accordance with previous studies, emotional violence is the most prevalent form experienced [5, 11, 43, 63], and patients are the main source of violence against healthcare staff [20, 70, 71].…”

“…Research in many countries, including Italy [20], indicates that workers in all sectors of healthcare are exposed to workplace violence [25] but that psychiatric [67] and emergency departments are the areas at greatest risk of patient and visitor violence [10], due to several factors that involve both patient pathology and the way services are organised and delivered [20]. Emergency departments are the areas that see the highest rates of patient or visitor violence [43, 54, 68]. The emergency ward is characteristically a high-pressure environment across the 24 hours of the day and experiences a high turnover of patients [37].…”

Prevalence of Type II and Type III Workplace Violence against Physicians: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

“…4 Investigators have yet to identify experimental approaches that comprise an applicable model to mitigate WPV risk reduction and to identify the underlying mechanisms and antecedent factors. 10 It is also improbable that a basic, “one-size-fits-all” model can be developed as a method for violence prevention. 10,11 Even though violence prevention training is widely available for employees, this has been unsuccessful so far in reducing rates of occurrence for WPV.…”

Doctor becomes a patient: a qualitative study of health care work place violence related perception among junior doctors working in a teaching hospital in India

“…These are only a fraction of much more common milder types of HCWPV which comprise of verbal abuse, bullying, intimidation, mental harassment, sexual harassment, and such physical assaults which involve manhandling and beating. [1][2][3][4][5][6] An analysis of data for more than 1,50,000 nurses drawn from 160 global samples has revealed that two third have experienced nonphysical assault while a third were physically assaulted. 2 Physical violence was reported to be more common in the -Anglo‖ and -Anglicized‖ regions i.e.…”