Beyond bringing awareness to the problem, the HAV movement also seeks to provide hospitals with additional support for mitigating risks and intervening before violent situations escalate. One way to do this is through accurate and ongoing reporting of on-site violence – a task that can be made much easier using designated incident reporting software.
Below, we’re digging deeper into some of the most common questions around hospital violence and how it plays out, including how tracking software from Immuware can minimize these and other types of risks at their earliest stages.
What Does Violence in Healthcare Look Like?
Hospital workers are on the front line of responding to violence in their communities. All too often, they’re also the recipients of violence and/or threats of violence both in and outside of the workplace.
Violence (or the threat of it) can take on many different forms for healthcare workers, including:
- Abusive patients
- Aggression from patients’ family members
- Targeted harassment in person or online
- Verbal threats
In the most severe instances of hospital violence, healthcare workers have even been fatally wounded on the job, such as the surgeon and three others killed at a Tulsa medical office by a patient who complained of ongoing back pain.
The HAV movement serves as a reminder to those in and outside the healthcare community about the risks that those in hospitals and other clinical facilities take on by the very nature of their careers. It also spreads essential information about how healthcare workers can combat violence in their workplaces and communities, an ever-more crucial task as rates of hospital violence continue to soar.
How Incident Management Software Can Help
Adequately addressing violence in healthcare is a multi-faceted endeavor. And it includes steps taken by employees, healthcare systems, and communities to promote a safety culture and prevent incidents of violence before they occur.
One solution that may help reduce hospital violence is improved incident case management protocols, mainly through automated software that makes it easier to track trends, patterns, and occurrences of violence. By providing hospitals with a simple tool for monitoring threats and actual instances of violence, this software goes a long way toward improving safety mitigation practices and, in some cases, preventing a threat from turning into something more.
At Immuware, we’ve developed an incident module that tracks a wide range of hospital safety events, including violence against healthcare workers and other threats from things like pathogen exposure, viral illness, and general injuries. Features include designated reports for tracking safety trends and automatic notifications of safety hazards so response plans can go into effect immediately.
Incident case reporting is an extension of our more extensive suite of employee health tracking tools that support employee health and the health and safety of hospital systems. In offering these tools, we hope to help healthcare facilities implement effective safety plans that build upon the prevention techniques promoted by the HAV movement and keep everyone safer on the job.
Learn More About How Immuware Can Help Keep Your Employees Safe
The threat of verbal or physical assault is just one of several significant risks healthcare workers face. Please get in touch to learn more about how Immuware can help you assess and prevent these risks and strengthen your commitment to protecting your providers and staff. Together, we can help support the mission of HAV and ensure that fewer hospital employees have to endure the trauma of on-site violence.
Want to stay up to date on other topics related to employee health and occupational health tracking? Check out our news page for additional resources on healthcare workers’ threats and the role of reporting tools in keeping employees safe. [/fusion_text][/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]