Position paper Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Position paper - Essay Example According to the Royal College of Nursing (Great Britain) and National Collaborating Centre for Nursing and Supportive Care (Great Britain) (2006), the venues with the highest probability of violence in hospitals include the emergency departments, facilities of psychiatry, home offices, private outpatient offices, forensic settings, mental health community, outpatients clinics, and general hospitals. Patients’ violence to the nurses takes many forms. According to Conroy and Murrie, (2007), they include physical harassment, threats, stalking, frivolous lawsuits, scurrilous and false accusations, complaints to licensure medical boards, vandalism, excessive or abusive letters and phone calls, obscene or threatening mails, loitering, trespassing, home visits and drive-by, and display of knowing of the personal life of the nurse. Many cases are being reported on violent crimes such as rape, assaults and homicides, especially in the emergency departments and the psychiatry facilitie s with nurses as the main targets (Tardiff, 1999). Statistical research Patients’ violence against nurses has been a thorny issue in the health sector. Eichelman and Hartwig (1995) give an overview of the issue when they document the survey done by the American Nurses Association. From the survey, the numbers of registered nurses who have reported cases of assault by the patients were 34%. This represented a rise in assault from 25 % in the year 2001. Results that are more shocking indicate that from the government statistics, eight nurses were reported killed in the work place from the year 2003 to the year 2009. In addition to that, 2050 more incidences were reported by the nurses and involved violent assault and harassment (Eichelman & Hartwig, 1995). Similarly, the report of Bureau of Labor Statistics of 2006 indicates that 60% of the assaults in work place took place in the healthcare, and most of them were because of the patient’s violence towards nurses (Crichto n, 1995). Moreover, the healthcare support occupations had a 20.4% injury rate due to assaults while healthcare practitioners had a 6.1% rate. These are just the results from the reported cases, and this figure could be larger if underreporting from the nurses, probably due to the perception that assaults forms part of work in the nursing profession, could be minimized (Babich, 1981). My argument from these statistics is that nurses and healthcare practitioners in the health profession face an acute problem which is underrated but affects their performance in their bid to deliver services to the patients. Richter and Whittington (2006) further validate the issue of the patient violence when they point out that nurses in the hospital emergency departments experience the highest rate of physical assault. Furthermore, Richter and Whittington (2006) observe that 28% of nurses working in the emergency departments reported that they have been victims of physical assault for the past one y ear. Violence in Emergency Departments In the hospital set up, patient violence to the nurses is a great issue that needs to be discussed soberly. Eichelman and Hartwig (1995) point out that the studies conducted by many bodies indicate that the nurses and other healthcare professional assigned in the emergency departments experience the highest level of violence from patients. This is because evaluation and treatment of the violent high-risk patients are initially