Hospital safety isn’t something the average person thinks about. Hospitals are where we go for emergencies, surgeries, births, and general ailments. As a patient of hospitals, we think of the staff as our care providers. What most people don’t know is that between 2011 and 2013, nearly 75% of workplace assaults took place in healthcare settings. While we are getting treated for our health issues, the staff in our hospitals are getting assaulted by their patients or the patient’s family members/friends. This is a very serious issue, and one that we don’t hear about often enough.
So what steps can hospitals take to ensure the safety of their staff? According to www.cureviolence.org, these are 3 steps to help eliminate hospital-based violence:
- Assessment of the types, severity, and amount of violence that your hospital treats.
- Identification of available resources in your community for domestic violence prevention, conflict mediation, behavioral change, and mental health.
- If your hospital treats a high volume of victims of community violence, implement a hospital-based program to prevent retaliation, treat mental trauma, and address behavioral effects.
We believe that hospitals can go a step further. By implementing emergency buttons on all computers that can be used to discreetly send and receive emergency notifications, utilizing a mass notification system that can warn the entire staff of a hospital in real time, and using a safety app system that can signal for emergency assistance (whether in the hospital or walking to/from the hospital) and being able to anonymously report suspicious activity; there are a lot of way that hospitals can start using technology to create a a safer environment in hospitals.
The safety of the hospital staff is imperative. If the hospital employees don’t feel safe, they’ll move on to another hospital and we will continue to see a decrease in available employees in the areas that need it the most. Hospital violence is a real, legitimate issue that must be handled accordingly. There are ways to improve the quality of your workplace, and we’re here to help you find those safety solutions.
Learn more about workplace violence prevention solutions.
Let’s take care of the people who take care of us.