Workplace violence against physicians and nurses in Palestinian public hospitals: a cross-sectional study

Workplace violence in the health sector is a worldwide concern with healthcare workers being at high risk of being victims [1]. Violence includes any physical assault, verbal abuse or threatening behavior occurring in a workplace setting [2]. Both physical and non-physical violence against health care workers is a major problem affecting their health and productivity. Moreover, the consequences of workplace violence in the health sector have a significant impact on the effectiveness of health systems, especially in developing countries [3].

Although health care providers are increasingly concerned about the escalating incidence of workplace violence, there is a lack of evidence to support this concern due to low violence reporting rates [4]. In the Arab region also there is relatively limited research conducted on violence in health care settings [5‐11].

Palestine is a country in chronic conflict and economic emergency [12]. The Palestinian Ministry of Health (MoH) is the main provider of health care services. The majority of the population is covered by the governmental health insurance scheme by which they are entitled to public services. This has increased the burden on limited public services, where most of public hospitals have high rates of service utilization and bed occupancy [13]. Besides routine care, these hospitals act as the main source of care for patients and injured people during political emergencies. Public hospitals are also known to suffer from many problems including understaffing and the frequent shortages of medicines and supplies which cause patients to wait for a long time before receiving services [14]. It is believed that these problems may cause violence against physicians and nurses. However, there remains a lack of adequate research evidence about the issue.

This study aims to assess the incidence, magnitude, and possible risk factors for workplace violence against nurses and physicians working in public hospitals in Palestine. It also examines the consequences of violence, professionals’ incident reporting patterns, and existing violence prevention and safety measures from health care workers’ perspectives. The study results can support the development of sound policy and strategies to prevent and manage work place violence against health workers in the country.

The study respondents’ characteristics are provided in Table 1. The majority of respondents were females (59.2%), nurses (65.8%), younger than 41 years old (80.4%), holding a bachelor’s or higher degree (76.2%), with the experience more than five years (71.8%) in the profession, and work in shifts (68.3%). Moreover, most of them (78.7%) worked in medium or large sized (≥75beds) hospitals, the primary departments in which they regularly worked were medical/ surgical (21.7%), followed by emergency (20.4%), more than one department (11.7%), pediatrics (10.8%), and dialyses (10%).

The main finding of the study was that 80.4% of the participants indicated exposure to workplace violence in the past 12 months. Despite some differences in the definition of violence, targeted professional groups, and methodology used, the study results are comparable with previous regional and international studies. In general, health workers in the Palestinian public hospitals have higher rate of exposure (80.4%) to both physical (20%) and non-physical violence (59.6%) than many other country studies [3, 5, 6, 10, 11, 17]. The fact that the majority of respondents were exposed to some type of violence is also a matter of concern. Although this study did not investigate the perceived reasons for violence, we hypothesize that the high level of violence against health workers can be explained by the current state of public services including understaffing and inadequate working conditions, frequent shortages of medicines and supplies, overcrowded hospitals and delays in receiving care as well as unmet patient needs/expectations [13, 14]. Furthermore, this situation is exacerbated, as the study results indicated, by lack of violence preventing strategies such as policy/procedures, training, and lack of adequate safety measures to protect health workers from violence in Palestinian public hospitals. Evidence from other studies showed that such conditions and factors can result in violence against health workers [5, 17‐19]. The dominant political instability and fragile economic conditions of the country could be other important causative factors. Difficult living conditions, frustration and stress in the daily life of Palestinians life probably increase the aggressive behavior against health workers; however, these factors were not examined in this study. AbuAlRub and colleagues [7] reported much higher level of violence against nurses in Iraq during political violence and economic instability. Increased violence against physicians in Israeli hospitals was also attributed to the deterioration of the economic and security situation [18].

In this study, physicians were slightly more exposed to violence than nurses, although, the difference was not statistically significant (P > 0.05). A study in Turkey [19] also showed the higher exposure of physicians to violence compared to other professions, but conversely in a study from Saudi Arabia nurses were significantly more exposed than physicians [9]. Culturally the medical profession in the Palestinian society is highly valued and dominant, which may account for this difference. Additionally, for that reason patients and relatives may hold higher expectations from physicians, dissatisfaction with health care can expose physicians to aggression more than other health care team members.

Certain characteristics have been found to increase the risk of workers being targets of workplace violence in the healthcare setting, including the workers’ gender, age, years of experience, marital status, and previous workplace violence training [20]. In this study, inconsistent with other studies in Lebanon, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia [6, 10, 11], no significant differences in the overall exposure to violence between males and females were found. However, males exposure to physical violence in general was significantly higher than females (P < 0.05). This was consistent with other studies from Arab countries in the region [5, 10, 11] and can be attributed to prevalent cultural norms rejecting disrespect to females in these societies. The logistic regression analysis, and in line with other studies [5, 10, 11, 17] revealed that respondents with less experience in health sector and those with lower educational level were significantly associated with exposure to violence (P < 0.05). Other studies provided evidence that as the age of health workers increased, the frequency of violence committed against them decreased [5, 10, 11, 17]. In this study, although significant association was found between respondents age groups and exposure to violence (P < 0.05), however, after adjustment by multiple logistic regression this association became insignificant (P > 0.05).

Detailed data on perpetrators were gathered in the study. Physical violence was mainly perpetrated by males of younger ages, and mainly those not impaired by illness, medications or substances. In comparison non-physical violence was mainly perpetrated by females of older age and mainly unimpaired persons. Available evidence show that men are more likely and physically capable of enacting physical violence than women who are more likely to enact verbal violence [11, 16, 20]. Also we can infer from our results that most of these incidents contained intentional violence and aggressive behaviors without perpetrators being under influence of disease or substances.

When we look at the magnitude of violence we can see that the majority were single events. Assaults were most likely (68%) to happen in the evening and night shifts (2 pm-8 am). Similar results were reported in studies in the region for examples Kuwait, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt [5, 7, 9, 10]. Higher rates of violence during this time can be also attributed to lower presence of hospital administration, and shortening of staff during the evening and night shifts that would require personnel to work alone [20]. Overloaded work demands place stress on human resources which would also increase conflict with patients and visitors. Consistence with research from Minnesota [16], most of the non-physical violence occurred face to face (86%) and in places where staff, patients, and relatives were in direct contact (60%) such as office stations, patients’ rooms, hallways, and reception/ waiting areas. This denotes inadequate communication skills between providers and recipients of care and weakness in dealing with violent acts or in how to engage the patients and families.

Many studies recognized emergency department as a particularly violent environment [21, 22]. In the present study, not surprising, most of the events (28% of the physical and 24% of the non-physical assaults) happened in the emergency departments. These departments are usually attended by aggressive and stressed patients/ visitors and those patients who are impaired by substances who are more likely to commit violence against health workers [16, 21, 22].

Similar to many of the previous studies the patient relatives’ and patients were frequently reported as the main source of violence [3, 7, 9, 11, 16, 17, 19]. Nevertheless, a matter of concern was the proportion of violence created by colleagues or supervisors. About 14% of respondents who encountered physical violence and 37% encountered non-physical incidents from their co-workers specifically from physicians. This was found to be higher than some previous studies [6, 11, 16]. Understaffing, job stress, low job satisfaction are among possible factors that might lead to aggression towards colleagues and co-workers in Palestinian hospitals. Miedema and colleagues [23] found that victims of co-worker violence reported a loss of confidence in their clinical abilities and this subsequently influenced their mental well being [3]. In addition, the co-workers and colleagues violence has negative consequences on team cooperation and on the safety of patient care.

The magnitude of violence in Palestinian public hospitals represented in the frequency of exposure to more than one violent event during the past year (at least 22%) was higher than found in previous studies [5, 16]. Moreover, 18% who experienced physical and 31.5% who experienced non-physical violence reported persistent problems as a result of the event. About half of those exposed did not receive any kind of treatment. This should be a matter of concern, especially as evidence shows that work related violence usually results in short and long term effects on the victims’ physical, psychological state, and professional performance [19, 20]. Not surprisingly, most of the respondents indicated psychological and emotional feelings such as anger, fear, depression, stress and frustration. Other studies [24, 25] showed that individuals who experience nonphysical violence, and endure feelings/symptoms over time, may be at risk for adverse mental health outcomes such as acute stress disorder or post-traumatic stress syndrome. In fact, about half of those who experienced physical or non-physical violence reported subsequent changes in their work status including restrictions in work, absence or subsequent transfer to another location. Apparently, this was much higher than the available evidence showed [9, 16]. Attention should be given to violence deterrent policies and measures at the workplace as well as enforcement of the legal system after such events.

Low violence reporting level in this study (56.3%) was similar to previous studies [3, 5, 7, 11, 16, 17, 19, 26]. The respondents attributed their reluctance to report due to lack of clear procedures for reporting and management encouragement to report. Respondents believed that reporting is useless because hospital management will not take any action besides, the fear of consequences such as blame or revenge of perpetrators. However, it is believed that socio-cultural norms and values of Palestinian society have a great impact. From experience it is known that in many cases incidents are not formally reported and disputes are settled through the tribal system rather than going to the court. Moreover, in many cases health workers consider this as part of the job, therefore tolerating the assailants, and do not feel that they should support reporting the events. The MoH should strengthen the incident reporting system in public hospitals and enforce laws to deter assaults against health workers as well as raising awareness in the community, and empower staff to cope with and report violence.

The study has some limitations, although a representative random sampling was used, due to time and resource restrictions, the study was limited to 5 public hospitals in the West Bank. Therefore these results may not be generalized to the whole hospital sector in Palestine. Moreover, the study used a retrospective self-reporting approach in data collection. This method depends on the ability of the participants to recall events in last 12 months previous to study, which might have potential biases.

This study employed a comprehensive approach to identify the incidence, magnitude, consequences and potential risk factors for workplace violence against physicians and nurses in Palestinian public hospitals. The MoH needs to introduce policy and strategies for prevention and management of workplace violence, enhancement of incident reporting and follow up on reported events as well as providing adequate physical and psychological support to victims of health workplace violence. There is a need to encourage reporting and follow up on incidents as well as providing adequate physical and psychological support to victims of health workplace violence. The results of the study can serve the development of appropriate policy and strategies on workplace violence against health workers and also can serve as the basis for future studies in the country. Further research on workplace violence in other sectors, and on causes of violence in health care settings are needed.