ReviewNurse exposure to physical and nonphysical violence, bullying, and sexual harassment: A quantitative review
Section snippets
Background
It has been well documented that nurses and other direct care health professionals are at significant risk for violence exposure (e.g., Happell, 2008, Nachreiner et al., 2005). A national Canadian study, for example, found that the rate of violence-related worker compensation claims was second highest of all occupations for nurses’ aides, and sixth highest for nurses (Boyd, 1995). Many qualitative reviews can be found in the nursing literature (the literature search for this project located 17)
Methodology
The methodology of this quantitative review followed accepted practices for conducting meta-analysis (e.g., Hunter and Schmidt, 1990, Rosenthal, 1991, Stroup et al., 2000). This included the following steps: (1) define the domain of interest, (2) conduct a search of relevant databases to identify potential articles for the analysis, (3) set inclusion criteria by which to screen potential articles, (4) retrieve statistics from the articles, and (5) conduct analyses.
Results
Analyses began by computing the mean percentage of nurses exposed for all studies broken down by type of violence. As shown in Table 1, 36.4% of nurses reported being physically assaulted, with 67.2% reporting nonphysical assault, 37.1% reporting being bullied, 27.9% reporting sexual harassment, and 50.5% reporting general violence not broken down by type (i.e., nurses were merely asked if they were subject to some type of violence at work). Almost a third of nurses indicated they had been
Discussion
Nurses’ exposure to different types of violence has been a topic of considerable research attention. The literature review for this paper located 136 published articles in the literature that provided incidence rates, and more than 100 additional papers on the topic that did not meet inclusion criteria. What analysis of these studies provides are estimates of the prevalence of different types of violence worldwide, as well as breakdowns by study timeframe, setting, source, and world region.
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