Prevalence and Epidemiological Features of Workplace Violence among Female Nurses at Governmental Hospitals in Qatar

Abstract

Background: Violence against nurses is a silent epidemic, but today concerns are rising about the growing levels of violence towards nurses. Objective: To estimate the prevalence of workplace violence among nurses working at governmental hospitals in Qatar. Results: Surveying HCW with response rate of (90%), (390) nurses with mean age of (36.08 ± 7.747). Most of them were married (79.2%) and non-Qatari (95.4%). Verbal abuse was the most common type of violence (30.6%) followed by physical and sexual harassment of (5.5%) and (1.7%) respectively. In all types of the studied violence either patients or patients’ relatives were the most common source of the violence. Health care management was greatly encouraging all the staff for reporting such incidences (88%) comparing to support from colleges or friends. Conclusion: Less than half of the nurses experienced workplace violence during the year prior to the study. Verbal abuse was the most common type while sexual harassment was the least common. The majority of attackers were patients, relatives of patients, then HCWs. There is a high need for raising awareness at HCW level as well as organizational level and implementing efficient mechanism to prevent and deal with such violence.