Violence to health care professionals: a health and safety perspective

Abstract

Violence, the subject of this book, is a topic that has received considerable attention from a wide variety of disciplines. In the context of health care the focus has been on the understanding, description and treatment of violent and aggressive patients. To the ‘carers’ (e.g. medical attendants, nurses and psychologists, psychiatrists) the threat of, or actual physical abuse, has been borne stoically as a truly ‘occupational hazard’, a matter-of-fact risk that was seen as ‘part-and-parcel’ of the job. For many, the caring professions are a vocation rather than a mere occupation, which probably tends to downplay feelings of threat. When incidents arose they were seen as a failure of the professional to handle difficult one-to-one situations, not a result of the need to restrain or secure severely disturbed patients. Debate was therefore focused at the individual level: the role of the carer, the implicit use of professional skills and the acceptable (accepted) or tolerable risks of particular tasks or jobs were presumably weighed against beneficial aspects such as self-esteem and job satisfaction.