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Reduce your workplace violence with initiatives from VCU Health

Healthcare Life Safety Compliance, June 28, 2020

This is an excerpt from a member only article. To read the article in its entirety, please login or subscribe to Healthcare Life Safety Compliance.

by Christopher Cheney, HealthLeaders Media

Healthcare organizations carry a heavy workplace violence burden, with about three-quarters of U.S. workplace assaults occurring in healthcare settings, according to OSHA. Workplace violence is especially prevalent in emergency departments—78% of emergency physicians have reported being targets of workplace violence in the prior 12 months.

“There is not one single silver bullet that makes your environment safer,” says Robin Hemphill, MD, chief quality and safety officer at VCU Health. Over the past five years, Hemphill says the Richmond, Virginia–based health system has taken several essential steps to address workplace violence: realizing that the organization had a problem, forming a committee to illustrate that the problem was systemwide rather than local, promoting incident reporting, and letting the staff know that abuse is not part of their job.

This is an excerpt from a member only article. To read the article in its entirety, please login or subscribe to Healthcare Life Safety Compliance.

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