Children’s hospitals can be high-risk for workplace violence. This article explores why workplace violence is so prevalent, discusses how staff and patients are impacted, and offers solutions to fix it.
An expert security panel discusses the necessity of innovative measures like Commure Strongline in combating workplace violence in healthcare.
The American Hospital Association’s national Hospitals Against Violence #HAVhope Friday is a day of awareness to exchange ideas and best practices among hospitals, health systems and technology vendors to spark innovative approaches for preventing violence in the workplace.
As a former McKinsey partner based in London, I got to know Heathrow Airport well. So this summer, I shuddered at the notorious photos of the more than 15,000 passenger bags from 90 different planes all piled up into a nightmare-ish luggage mountain that took over Terminal 2. To those 15,000 passengers, a lost bag was far more than a mishap –– the consequences were far-reaching and personal.
Healthcare is an industry powered by people who dedicate their lives to delivering quality, compassionate care. Yet, those same caregivers are subjected to higher rates of workplace violence than any other industry. As Press Ganey’s latest data reveals, in the second quarter of 2022 alone, 57 nurses were assaulted daily — that’s two assaults every hour.
As we begin to leave the pandemic era of the past two years, we are facing a new epidemic in healthcare settings across the country: Workplace violence — including physical and verbal abuse, harassment, and intimidation — against clinicians and staff has reached crisis levels.
Burnout is far from a novel issue in healthcare, and for the past decade, our industry has worked hard to identify, examine, and alleviate it. However, with every well-intentioned step forward, we seem to hit a new hurdle and stumble backward yet again — pushing our healthcare workforce to an existential brink.
When it comes to innovation, sometimes there can be too much of a good thing. The surge of innovation in recent years aimed at improving healthcare for patients and healthcare professionals has been remarkable. Yet pervasive fragmentation underlying our industry leaves us with a paradoxical problem: The more we innovate to become more consumer-centric, the more that patients, providers, and payors are left to connect all the dots themselves and navigate a sea of new technologies.
As a health care provider industry, our efforts to elevate patient safety have been relentless, highly visible and with substantive improvements for the past several decades. Federal and state governments, insurance companies, employers and consumers have all played a role in driving the industry to enhance safety and quality for our patients. There have been parallel efforts to improve the safety of the workplace for our caregivers, but on arguably the most devastating reality of violence in the workplace, we have failed to find effective solutions and the problem has escalated.
What sets a physician apart from any other profession? Beyond the immediate qualifications that come to mind (highly-skilled expertise, tireless training, life-or-death decision-making), the true “heart” of a doctor was famously distilled by Dr. Martin H. Fischer in 1930: “Observation, reason, human understanding, courage—these make the physician.” Almost a century later, this is no less true today.
