A National Standard to Prevent Health Care Workplace Violence?

National Nurses United joined members of Congress to speak out at a press conference unveiling findings from the Government Accountability Office’s 2016 report on workplace violence prevention in health care. Photo courtesy of National Nurses United.

In 2014, health care and social assistance workers suffered injuries from workplace violence at a rate more than four times higher than that of private sector employees. What can be done to keep health care workers safe on the job?

As we report in an April news article, National Nurses United, AFL–CIO, and other unions have petitioned the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to create a federal standard for preventing health care workplace violence. OSHA issued a request in December for information on the subject, and held a public hearing in January in which health care workers spoke about their experiences of workplace violence and their ideas for improving safety and protection policies. Through early April, the agency collected comments from the public on a federal standard—but uncertainty surrounds its direction under the Trump administration.

Nine states have enacted measures against workplace violence in health care settings. The toughest of these is California’s Workplace Violence Prevention Health Care standard, which was enacted last year. It requires health care facilities to implement a comprehensive program with multiple components for addressing workplace violence.

See more news stories from our April issue, which are free to access through April 21:

2017-04-14T08:49:22-04:00April 14th, 2017|Nursing|0 Comments
Read More

Preventing Violence Against Nurses

shawnkennedyWhen I graduated from nursing school, my first job was as an ED nurse at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. We’re talking about the 1970s, when drugs were plentiful and plenty of young people used them, especially hallucinogenic drugs like LSD and mescaline. Many times these patients were violent because of “bad trips” or because as the drugs wore off, they “crashed.” Sometimes these patients were accompanied by friends who were just as stoned as they were. I often experienced situations in which patients or visitors became disruptive and sometimes violent, usually because they didn’t understand what was happening to them or because they were scared and paranoid. We had no strategy or guidelines for proceeding—it was pretty much trial and error. Sometimes reasoning worked, but often it didn’t, and then we called security.

Dan Hartley.

Violence in the ED and hospital setting hasn’t gone away. In fact, I just learned from Dan Hartley, an epidemiologist with the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), that according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, between 2003 and 2010 the health care and social assistance industry […]

2018-11-11T17:13:15-05:00August 29th, 2013|nursing perspective|0 Comments
Read More

AJN’s Top 10 Blog Posts for the Last Quarter

At this blog we’re not always devoted practitioners of the art of the list. Used too often and too cynically (some of the more mysterious nursing blogs consist entirely of lists of articles and excerpts from other blogs), lists can be just another form of journalistic cannibalism.

But it sometimes occurs to me, as I publish a new post that takes its place at the top of the home page and pushes all those below down another notch (until, after a few such nudges, they gradually fall off the page, entering the purgatory of the blog archives), that this isn’t entirely fair.

While blogs allow for quick reaction to a news story, a public health emergency or controversy, a new bit of published research, they are also places for writing that isn’t so narrowly tied to a specific date and event. Many thoughtful posts by excellent writers have been published here in the past couple of years. With this in mind, here’s a list of the 10 most read blog posts for the past 90 days. It doesn’t mean that these are necessarily the very best posts we published in that time, or that they were even published in the last 90 days . . . but it’s one way of measuring relevance.—Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor 

1. Dispatches from the Alabama Tornado Zone
This one is actually a page with links to a series of powerful and thought-provoking posts by Susan Hassmiller, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Senior Adviser for Nursing, who volunteered with the Red Cross after the devastating Alabama tornadoes in late April of this year.

2. 

2016-11-21T13:12:17-05:00August 2nd, 2011|healthcare social media, nursing perspective, students|1 Comment
Read More

Workplace Violence: Whose Problem Is It?

By Julianna Paradisi, RN

Once upon a time, I was the assured quality (AQ) representative for a nursing unit. I attended monthly AQ committee meetings with members from medicine, pharmacy, laboratory, and respiratory therapy to review incident reports. We developed processes for improving patient safety and work flow. Agenda items changed monthly, except for the paper towel dispenser problem.

The unit had a paper towel dispenser, which operated by a lever. It was noisy, disturbing the patients. It did not hold enough paper towels for 24 hours. Since housekeeping did not staff to fill paper towel holders on night shift, physicians and nurses entering the room found them empty after washing their hands in the morning. This angered everyone, so it went on the AQ committee’s agenda.

The unit needed new towel dispensers. However, the committee could not determine whose job it was to research replacements. No one knew which department was responsible for ordering new dispensers, or whose budget would pay for them. Since there were other agenda items to discuss, every month the towel dispenser problem was “parked” for the next meeting. This continued for the entire time I served on AQ. The problem remained unresolved when I moved on.

Workplace violence toward nurses feels like the “irresolvable dilemma” of the paper towel dispenser. Over the years, statistics […]

2016-11-21T13:13:58-05:00February 28th, 2011|career, Nursing|1 Comment
Read More

Nursing Is Hazardous to Our Health

By Shawn Kennedy, AJN interim editor-in-chief

We all know that our nursing jobs expose us to various hazards—back and joint problems, needlesticks and other means of exposure to infectious diseases, traumatic injuries from encounters with violent patients or their family members, just to name some common ones. And as if that’s not enough, the psychological toll taken can result in burnout and even PTSD, which wreak havoc on retention. Heart disease and depression should probably also be on the list.

You may have seen news reports about a study with Danish nurses, published in the May issue of Occupational and Environmental Medicine. The researchers found that nurses younger than 51 years at baseline who perceived their workplaces as highly stressful were significantly more likely to have ischemic heart disease during the 15-year follow-up. Now, as the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry reports, a Finnish study has found that nurses and physicians who work in overcrowded acute care units have “twice the risk of sickness absence due to depressive disorders” compared with colleagues working in less crowded areas. And Health Policy reports on a study revealing that, among Canadian nurses, “Depression is a significant determinant of absenteeism for both RNs and LPNs.”

Is anyone surprised? Not nurses, for sure, and probably no one who’s worked at or been a patient in a hospital recently. With few exceptions, hospitals are generally terrible places to work. Yes, the

2016-11-21T13:17:24-05:00June 4th, 2010|nursing perspective, nursing research|6 Comments
Read More

Comment ground rules

1. Please be respectful.
2. We moderate all comments.

Content disclaimer

Views expressed on the blog are solely those of the authors or persons quoted. They do not necessarily reflect AJN’s views or those of Wolters Kluwer Health/Lippincott Williams and Wilkins.
Go to Top