Violence Against Emergency Medical Personnel Assistant

Abstract

Background and aim: Violence is defined as either the use of voluntary physical power against the person himself or someone else, a group, a society or to threaten them without the use of physical power. Patient relatives as well as patients are prone to exert violence against the healthcare professionnals. When we evaluate the behaviors, it is seen that they are ordinary interactions of the daily activities. Some are tolerable under certain circumstances or some are forgivable assuming that the person’s current mood is not so well. However, the meanings of these continuous and repeating behaviors at workplace change by time and become dangerous social behaviors. In this regard, facing of the auxiliary healthcare personnel with the danger of violence directly as victims or indirectly as witnesses reveals the importance of this problem. In this study the aim is to investigate the violence towards the emergency care providers.
Matherial and method: It was carried out between March 1st - 10th, 2011 at XXX Hospital. Healthcare providers are grouped as emergency medicine technician, nurse and sanitary servant. The data was evaluated with the SPSS 18 programme and chi-square test was used for the comparison of the groups. p<0.05 was accepted as significant.
Results: There were 44 (50.6 %) males and 43 (%49.4) females. 49 (% 56.3) cases which are older than 32 years of age were exposed most to the violence.
Conclusions: The final results showed that males are predominantly exposed to violence and rates of exposure increases as the education level decreases.