Violence towards nurses

While national nursing organizations, nursing unions, and most employers tell you that violence against nurses is not tolerated in the workplace - the truth is that we get attacked. A lot. According to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, nurses have 12 times the rate of days off because of assaults in the workplace. That's double the rate for police officers.

I work in mental health, specifically psycho-geriatrics. Many people, especially fellow nurses, roll their eyes and say, "Well, of course you're going to get hit." It's part of the nursing culture to accept abuse. A booklet published by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in 2004 noted that violence in health facilities was, “...likely to be underreported, perhaps due in part to the persistent perception within the health care industry that assaults are part of the job.”

Today I received a good scratching and a blow to the ribs from a patient. It reminded me that we spend very little time discussing this subject in nursing school and often it is not at all addressed in specialties outside psychiatry. We are not alone though. In a 2006 survey by the national Emergency Nurses Association, almost 90% of respondents said they had experienced violence in the previous three years, and 20% said they encountered it frequently.

Fewer and fewer students are entering the nursing profession. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services report that the average age of RNs climbed to 46.8 years, the highest average age since the first comparable report was published in 1980. They go on to say that just over 41 percent of RNs were 50 years of age or older (33 percent in 2000 and 25 percent in 1980). As for the young blood in nursing, only 8 percent of RNs were under the age of 30, compared with 25 percent in 1980.

There are many reasons young people are not choosing to go into nursing. The public understands the unpleasant shift hours, the stress of an ever increasing technological environment coupled with more and more limits to resources, and the difficult science requirements to get into nursing. What the public doesn't know is that we also work in a culture where violence against us is both ignored and accepted.