To prevent these violent acts in hospitals and other healthcare settings, leadership has to make a commitment to prevention. According to the viewpoint, penned by Ron Wyatt, MD, with the Joint Commission, leadership commitment to preventing these acts includes:
- Establishing a violence prevention program
- Encouraging reporting of violent events
- Reassuring workers actions will be taken
- Engaging employees and patients in safety plans
- Measuring the organization’s violence prevention programs
“A workplace violence prevention program should be a required component of the patient safety system of all healthcare organizations,” Dr. Wyatt wrote. Successful violence prevention programs and processes should be made up of the following four parts, per the viewpoint article:
1. Incorporate workplace violence prevention in new employee training and ongoing training for existing employees. This should include raising awareness about the issue of workplace violence and training employees how to report events and perform threat assessment.
2. Implement functional reporting systems. Reporting systems are necessary but often underused because employees believe some vents are just part of the job or they fear retaliation. “For these reasons, reporting systems should be simple, trusted, secure and with optional anonymity; result in transparent outcomes and delivery or a report confirmation; and be fully supported by leadership, labor unions and management.
3. Develop a treatment and safety management plan if a behavior poses an ongoing risk. This could include noninvasive approaches, such as conversing with the individuals or writing letters expressing behavioral expectations, to approaches that limit the time, place or manner in which care is delivered.
4. Inform employees of the management plan. This “should enable the ongoing cycle of effective violence prevention programming,” according to the JAMA viewpoint, which is, “employees are educated and trained regarding the management plan and have the skills necessary to implement it; they report the outcome of implementing the plan; information regarding the management plan’s effectiveness is assessed (or reassessed) and modified according to risk; and such modifications are then communicated back to employees.”
