The American Nurses Association reports that one in four nurses has experienced workplace violence. In the second quarter of 2022, more than 5,200 nurses were attacked in healthcare facilities across the country.
Meanwhile, a survey by the Emergency Nurses Association shows that seven in 10 emergency department nurses say they have been kicked or punched on the job. This problem is exacerbated by social and political pressures and other issues related to overcrowding, long waiting times and circumscribed staffing.
All nursing professional organizations are addressing this issue. The American Nurses Association, the American Organization of Nurse Leaders, the Association of Emergency Care Nurses, and the Joint Commission have established standards and provided toolkits for mitigating workplace violence.
“A workplace culture that prioritizes silence over safety is just another form of violence,” ANA said.
Zero tolerance for workplace violence is a necessity, said Rhonda Collins, DNP, RN, chief nursing officer at Kontakt.io, a provider of healthcare analytics solutions. Collins has been a registered nurse for over thirty years and has served as a hospital executive. She also served as Director of Nursing at Vocera Communications, where she continued her mission to adapt technology to the real needs of the hospital.
recently spoke with Collins to get her thoughts on workplace violence affecting nurses and discuss the causes and potential solutions – including the crucial importance of technology.
Q: As a nurse and nurse, you have worked both on the front lines and in leadership positions in major hospitals. How have you dealt with the issue of workplace violence in these positions?
AND. Early in my career, I expected nurses to monitor their patients’ behavior. There was a belief that if I couldn’t control a patient, I wasn’t doing my job effectively. This created an atmosphere of reluctance to report incidents, which led to both an escalate in the number of incidents and their severity.
Of course, over time we realized that empowering nurses to report, call for support, and get answers was critical to reducing injuries. I think to some extent hospitals still struggle to implement effective policies; however, we are seeing more open discussions, policies, protocols, and even technology to support healthcare workers, including nurses, get support when needed.
Many organizations have created an assessment process to identify patients who may be prone to aggressive behavior. The CDC offers these assessments on its website. Identifying these patients, their triggers, environments, and diagnoses is critical to ensuring patient and worker safety.
Over time, assessing common characteristics can provide insight into what triggers aggressive behavior. There is always an opportunity to evaluate the patient experience, which includes patient wait time, time spent with the doctor, time spent in exam rooms, and time spent waiting to see the doctor.
Destitute environmental design, needy lighting, insufficient security, long waiting times and needy staffing have been identified as contributing factors to workplace violence incidents. We need to collect this critical data and work to improve patient experiences throughout the process and reduce tension and the potential for workplace violence.
A combination of assessment and intensive evaluation of people and places, based on data, wait times and patient experiences, helps reduce aggressive actions and outbursts by patients and their families.
Question: You say technology can support reduce violence among nurses in the workplace. Let’s start with the IoT devices you point to. What role do they play?
AND. Solid teams, including security, management and frontline workers, can create policies, train and engage all stakeholders in the workplace and community. However, the ability to call for support when needed requires a technological solution.
Most hospitals provide an emergency delicate or number, but the person under duress must be able to reach him wherever he is. We often see duress buttons attached to the side of another piece of technology, accessible on one wall in a patient’s room, or placed in some other inconvenient way. It’s not enough.
It has been proven time and time again that this does not protect healthcare workers or prevent incidents of violence in the workplace. In order for the nurse to be able to call for support immediately, a call device must be attached.
More and more hospitals are using portable devices to make urgent calls that allow you to be located anywhere with the press of a button. The user does not have to call, send text messages or otherwise request support. With just the press of a tactful button, we can support.
Handy duress buttons with instant alerts – this technology is here and now and has been proven to be effective with the following features and capabilities:
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Featherlight and comfortable
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Be part of already existing wearable devices (such as badges)
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Possibility to program a call to any entity for immediate response
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Trigger a hushed alarm including touch response for the nurse
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Precise location tracking down to the room level
Most importantly, portable emergency alarms must be consistently reliable and reliable. I cannot emphasize this enough. With any security solution, it is critical to work with partners that have a proven track record of success and reliability.
Q. And another technology: artificial intelligence. What role does artificial intelligence play?
AND. Artificial intelligence plays a vast role in the organization of care. Data provided by hospital patient journey analytics (based on real-time indoor location data), which includes workplace violence technology, helps optimize processes and resources by revealing how patients and staff move through the care system health.
Artificial intelligence combined with IoT and RTLS can support healthcare organizations protect your employees, optimize your workflow and save money. This is the future of healthcare operations.
Artificial intelligence-based analytics ultimately can be used to identify areas of vulnerability, frequency of events and people involved. Artificial intelligence can provide answers to questions about areas to focus on for operational or educational improvement opportunities.
Artificial intelligence can combine patient assessments with technology reports to identify patients at high risk for violent events and proactively identify a patient at risk to the healthcare team. Owning the data provides the foundation to facilitate machine learning environments, workflows, and solutions.
Using the same technology in other cases, such as asset tracking and management, patient escapes, etc., makes the data more resilient and the resulting information more insightful and actionable.
Q. Please describe a real-world example of these technologies in action and the results you achieved.
AND. A health care system in northeast Georgia was looking for a modern system that would escalate staff safety. Hospital directors noticed that, especially during emergency department visits, patients come not only because of their diseases, but also bring with them their fears, vulnerability, socio-economic problems and family problems.
As a result, frontline workers sometimes felt uneasy interacting with patients and their families.
To improve staff safety, NGHS has equipped 9,000 employees with portable duress buttons that are location-aware and integrated with existing security and nursing workflows. When employees encounter potentially hazardous situations, they can simply click a button to notify safety teams that they need support.
Since implementing portable restraint buttons, hospital administrators report that staff feel safer and appreciate the added layer of protection.
Separately, NGHS uses the same technology to track patients throughout the hospital. This aspect of the platform helps ensure NGHS has the right resources at the right place and time to best provide high-quality patient care.
For example, when a doctor is making rounds and a specific patient is not in the room, the technology informs the doctor of the patient’s absence, saving time and increasing the efficiency of resource allocation.
Hospital management reports that employees are quite elated to wear tactful technology that allows them to call for support when needed and stop incidents of workplace violence from escalating. It’s more than just a safety measure; it is also part of an inventive strategy to optimize care activities, reduce costs and improve the way care is delivered to patients.