Violence Against Allied Healthcare Personnel in an Emergency Department

Objectives: Violence is defined as either the use of voluntary physical power against the person himself or someone else, a group, a society or to threaten them without the use of physical power. Patients’ relatives as well as patients themselves are prone to exert violence against the healthcare professionals. These behaviors may ben seen as ordinary interactions of the daily activities. Some can be tolerable under certain circumstances while some others can be forgivable assuming that the person’s current mood is not so well. However, the meanings and the dimensions of these continuous and repeating behaviors at workplace change by time and they turn into dangerous social behaviors. In this regard, the allied healthcare personnelmay face the violence directly as victims or face it indirectly as witnesses and this reality reveals the importance of this problem. In this study we aimed to investigate the violence towards the emergency care providers in an urban emergency department.Methods: The study was carried out between March 1st - 10th, 2011 at Ankara Numune Training and Research Hospital (Turkey). The healthcare providers were grouped as emergency medical technicians, nurses and sanitary servants. The data was evaluated with the SPSS v.18 and chi-square test was used for the comparison of the groups. A p value <0.05 was accepted as significant. Results: There were 44 (50.6%) males and 43 (49.4%) females in the study group. The group that was exposed to violence most frequently was determined to be the 32 years and older in age with 49 (56.3%) cases. Conclusions: The results showed that males were predominantly exposed to violence and rates of exposure increases as the education level decreases.