Violence Against Health Care Workers in Emergency Hospital, Tanta University, Egypt

Abstract

Introduction: Workplace violence (WPV) among the healthcare workers is an alarming phenomenon worldwide. Personnel at Emergency departments are particularly at risk and are more exposed to violence in their workplace from patients and their relatives or friends compared with other departments. Aim of work: To identify the prevalence of workplace violence at Tanta University Emergency Hospital and its impact on affected workers. Materials and methods: A cross sectional study was conducted at Tanta University Emergency Hospital during the period from September 2017 to April 2018. The total sample size was 340 physicians and nurses. Data were collected using a structured questionnaire. Results: Physical violence was reported by 30.6% while verbal violence by 76.5% and 16 participants reported sexual violence (4.7%). Exposure to more than one type of violence was declared by 28.8%. The main perpetrators were patients' relatives (85.6%) while 50% of sexual violence was by unknown visitors to the hospital. Nearly one quarter of victims of physical and sexual violence need vacation after the assault while only 6.9% of victims of verbal violence asked for vacation. Psychological, work and physical troubles were reported by victims. Conclusion: verbal violence came first followed by physical and sexual violence. The victims suffered from psychological, work related and physical effects.

Violence against healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic: a cross-sectional survey at Cairo University Hospital

“…93% reported verbal violence, 43% reported both verbal and physical, and 59% stated that violence increased during the pandemic. Those violence ratios are comparable to those reported at different Egyptian healthcare institutions during COVID-19, ranging from 10 to 40% for physical violence and an average of 80% for verbal violence ( 29 , 30 ). However, those numbers are not different from those reported before the pandemic, according to the systematic review and meta-analysis by Stanely et al, who reported a ratio of 59.7–86.1 of healthcare workers in Egypt reporting violence in the workplace ( 31 ).…”

Nurses' experiences of workplace violence in the emergency department

“…Nurses working in ED are vulnerable to WPV due to their presence at the clinical frontline and their high‐pressured and stressful work (Hamdan & Hamra, 2017). Other factors include being in direct contact with suffering and anxious patients, the unpredictable nature of their workload and pattern of work, and insufficient training around using safety and security precautions against WPV (Hamdan & Hamra, 2017; Kabbash & El‐ Sallamy, 2019).…”

Evidence-Based Design for Workplace Violence Prevention in Emergency Departments Utilizing CPTED and Space Syntax Analyses

“…Studies showed that emergency departments (EDs) are the most exposed to WPV in Egyptian hospital (Anwar et al, 2017;Moustafa & Gewaifel, 2013), while the main perpetrators are patient's relatives followed by patients and the targeted victims are usually the healthcare workers (Abdel-Salam, 2014;Anwar et al, 2017;Bakr et al, 2019;Kabbash & El-Sallamy, 2019;Rasha Abdellah, 2017). The most common type of WPV according to the previous studies outlined in Table 1 is verbal violence followed by physical violence.…”