A Psychological Counseling-Oriented Model Proposal for Reducing Violence in Emergency Services

Violence is destructive and back-breaking not only for health workers but also for patients and their relatives and leads to various emotional and physical injuries, job dissatisfaction, and absenteeism. It causes fatal mistakes and has a negative impact on the quality of service. On the other hand, patients and their relatives may be anxious, nervous, sensitive, or tend to show anger due to their situation. Such reasons may bring patients and their relatives face to face with the health workers who should be on the same side. However, health workers and patients share a common goal and must act together. In this context, it is thought that violence will be significantly reduced if the causes leading to violence are eliminated for both groups. In this context, the psychological and social reasons that lead people to act aggressively should be identified and eliminated in order to prevent violence in emergency services. The proposed model aims to provide psychological support to patients and their relatives at the psychological counseling unit to be established, guide health workers during the provision of healthcare services, train health workers on communication, compassion, empathy, and emotion management, and regulate the mood of patients, patient relatives, and health workers in order to prevent violence in emergency services. Various search engines were used for the literature search. The search keywords were determined as “violence in the emergency room”, “causes of violence”, “prevention of violence” and “violence in health”; however, studies including topics such as environmental risk management and safety measures were excluded.