Workplace Harassment in Healthcare Settings
Nurses experience a wide range of abuses in the workplace including physical and psychological harassments and physical violence. Patients, patients’ families or friends, and coworkers can all precipitate harassment and abuse directed at nurses, with worldwide prevalence rates at over 36% for physical violence and 66.9% for nonphysical violence (Spector, Zhou & Che, 2014). Bullying, abuse of power, gender discrimination, sexual harassment, or racial harassment by coworkers and supervisors are also relatively common, creating toxic environments in healthcare organizations (Lee, Bernstein, Lee, et al., 2014). In fact, the majority of violent or abusive acts remain unreported due to the lack of institutional support or formal methods of reporting experiences of violence or harassment by either patients or coworkers (Kvas & Seljak, 2014).
Females and demographic minority nurses are at a much higher risk for being targeted for harassment and abuse (Okechukwu, Souza, Davis, et al., 2013). Incidence rates and types of abuse also vary depending on geographic location and cultural context, with physical violence most common in psychiatric facilities, geriatric facilities, and emergency units in Anglo countries, and nonphysical violence being more common in other healthcare settings and in the Middle East (Spector, Zhou & Che, 2014). Also, patients are the cause for physical violence more often in Anglo and European countries than in the Middle East, which has more incidents of patient and patient family-related violent incidents towards nurses (Spector, Zhou & Che, 2014). Identifying at risk populations and environmental risk factors would therefore help administrators and policymakers prevent abuses and create a culture of safety within healthcare organizations.
The lack of motivation to report a potentially large number of abusive incidents in the workplace could suggest a lack of institutional support for nurses who experience violence or harassment from patients, patients’ families, or coworkers. When the abuses are caused...
References
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