In this blog, learn practical strategies to build a winning game plan to address workplace violence from seasoned chief nursing executive and ED nurse Jeanne Venella.
Jeanne Venella, DNP, MS, CEN, CPEN
Chief Nursing Executive / Strategic Advisor - Commure Strongline
Those that know me know that as a nurse leader with over three decades of experience in Adult and Children’s Emergency Departments, I am passionate about three things:
- Shaping the future healthcare workforce by educating the next generation of leaders and medical staff.
- Combating workplace violence (WPV) in healthcare settings, a growing and unsustainable epidemic.
- Baseball and the Philadelphia Phillies.
Having experienced violence myself as a nurse at work, I do not list baseball and WPV together to be trite. Rather, I believe sports are more than just entertainment. They offer a framework to help us to understand leadership, teamwork, and the world around us.
Thus, in the spirit of combining my three passions, I believe we can leverage key principles from the teachings of Jeff Angus in “Management by Baseball,” to create a winning game plan to address WPV in healthcare. As leaders, we have the unique responsibility and opportunity to foster a positive, collaborative, and safer work environment for teams everywhere.
First Base: Understanding the Current State
Angus explains how managing the mechanics of baseball is similar to other complex problem-solving. It starts with having a clear picture of the business, management, and the team. Baseball organizations rely heavily on data and analytics to make data-driven business decisions, set objectives, and communicate transparently across the organization.
The picture is clear in healthcare: WPV is permeating the playing field for healthcare staff everywhere.
- 82% of nurses have experienced at least one type of WPV within the past year.
- 5% YoY increase in incidents of WPV in healthcare from 2022 to 2023, reaching an all-time high.
- 21% of WPV victims require more than 31 days away from work, another 20% require 3 to 5 days away from work.
- WPV incidents occurred most often on psychiatric units, the ED, adult units, pediatrics, and perioperative units, respectively.
Exposure to WPV has a significant impact on staff, impairing effective patient care and leading to psychological distress, job dissatisfaction, absenteeism, high turnover, and higher costs.
Second Base: Creating a Team-Based Approach to Address Workplace Violence
A foundational component of any baseball organization’s success is encouraging a multi-disciplinary, team-oriented culture where every member understands their role and works toward common goals.
Leaders of healthcare today must take the same approach to achieve our common objective of combating workplace violence head-on. To do so, health systems must bring together diverse work groups with representatives across various parts of the system. Responsibilities of the interdisciplinary workplace violence committee include:
- Establish a baseline across each facility, department, unit to assess incidents of WPV, even analyzing by patient cohort or time of day or night.
- Identify and develop targets for reducing the incidence rate of WPV.
- Review the current reporting process and identify what measures to improve or implement.
- Evaluate appropriate interventions and tools, and develop standards, processes, and strategies to prevent and reduce WPV.
- Implement an agreed upon approach to introduce new processes to the organization, using a staged or phased approach.
Third Base: Leading With Authenticity
Authentic leadership, or as Angus describes, a leader who is acutely aware of him or herself and leads with empathy, plays a crucial role in bringing the best out of team members and creating a positive team culture.
Similarly, authentic leadership from healthcare’s frontline and senior leaders is essential to reducing workplace violence by fostering a culture of trust, open communication, conflict resolution, and support. Team members should trust that they can report their experience and won’t be blamed for what happened or shamed into thinking it’s “just part of the job”.
Reducing and preventing WPV is just half of the problem, WPV management requires having the proper plan in place to respond appropriately when staff are impacted. This means knowing when, where, and to whom an event has occurred. Highly effective workplace violence prevention programs empower staff to report their experiences. Best practices to operationalize and enable include:
- Establishing a process to report incidents in order to analyze incidents and trends
- Promoting empathetic leaders who are trained on how to respond when a staff member comes to them
- Supporting victims and witnesses affected by workplace violence, including trauma and psychological counseling, if necessary
- Reporting workplace violence incidents to the governing body
WPV management is a classic example of interdisciplinary leadership, involving clinical, HR, security, legal, and other departments. The scope of this work goes beyond merely responding to incidents to laying the foundation for continuous improvement, leveraging hard data to make decisions for staff safety and response processes.
Home Plate: Adopting New Strategies and Tools to Address Workplace Violence
As a response to declining viewership, baseball has adapted its strategies in recent years and to improve the game, changing its rule to include a pitcher’s time clock and lowering the pitcher’s mound. The result has been an increase in fan engagement, reviving ticket generation and bringing in new audiences.
Healthcare’s governing bodies are also adapting to the epidemic of workplace violence. In 2022, The Joint Commission (TJC) mandated new and revised workplace violence prevention standards that will apply to all Joint Commission-accredited hospitals and critical access hospitals to assure organization’s take a systematic approach to reducing WPV.
There are three new elements of performance (EPs) and two revised EPs to its requirements. These EPs, which fall within the “Environment of Care” (EC), “Human Resources” (HR), and “Leadership” (LD) chapters, directly address workplace violence.
New tools for healthcare organizations such as Commure Strongline wearable staff duress badges put the power in their employees’ hands. They feature discreet panic buttons that empower your staff to call for help at the first signs of distress: immediately providing security and nearby staff your name and precise location to enable early intervention and de-escalation.
Make it a Grand Slam: Don’t Wait to Address Workplace Violence
Bringing together these lessons from baseball, we understand that success in healthcare requires acting today to address workplace violence.
As leaders, we have the unique responsibility and leadership position to foster a positive, collaborative, and safer work environment for healthcare teams everywhere. This is the same objective that every baseball management team aspires to as well. And it’s not just good for the team, it’s good for fans, which is good for business.
Keeping your staff safe is not just a moral imperative, it’s a business imperative, and foundational to healthcare itself. When staff feel secure, they can flourish in their roles, leading to enhanced patient satisfaction and delivery of high-quality care.