Incidence and Risk Factors of Workplace Violence against Pre Hospital Staffs in Mazandaran; North of Iran

Introduction: Ambulance personnel are often the first people to encounter patients needing emergency care. As they are the first healthcare systems who interface the patients and their relatives so they are susceptible to threat reactions and violence. Therefore unclearness of the threats nature against the ambulance staff and also their frequencies was the purpose of current study.Methods: This was an observational cross-sectional study which was carried out in the primary health care centers in Mazandaran University of medical sciences from January 2016 to august 2017. All nurses available during the field work of the study in the primary health care centers (157 persons) were enrolled this study. The tool for data collection was a self-administered questionnaire. Data were imported to the SPSS v19 for both data analysis and tabular presentation.Findings: 57 of respondents (35.2%) experienced physical violence. 110 (67.9%) of the personnel had been exposed to forms of verbal aggression. There was a significant relationship between the patient’s age and occurrence of both verbal aggression and physical violence (P=0.067) and patients who were younger had more aggressive behavior (P=0.083). But there was not significant relationship between the site of staff duty and aggressions. No incidence of racial or sexual aggression was found in our study. The results regard to coping with the violence was inviting to calm in more than half of cases 64 of 113 (56.6%).Conclusion: This study shows that threats and violence are a frequently occurring work-place problem within ambulance services.

Keywords:

Pre Hospital Staff , Violence , Threats