Workplace violence status, vulnerable and preventive factors among nurses working in psychiatric wards

Workplace violence is one of the issues that nurses face in clinical practice, which needs to be studied. One of the most eventful clinical environments is a psychiatric ward. The aim of this study was to determine workplace violence status, vulnerable and preventive factors among nurses working in psychiatric wards. In this study, 183 nurses were selected from psychiatric wards in Razi Psychiatric Center in Tehran, by simple random sampling. Data gathered with "International Workplace Violence Questionnaire". The questionnaire contains 4 subscales, physical, mental, sexual and rational violence and three open ended questions. Content and face validity were measured by opinion of experts and reliability was confirmed by test-retest (r=0.73).Data analyzed with descriptive statistics methods by SPSS/18. Prevalence of workplace violence was 71% in one year period. Physical and psychological violence, respectively, with a frequency of 4.93% and 6.71%, respectively racial and sexual violence, respectively, with a frequency of 1.19%, and 5.5% lower than subjects who had suffered violence. Majority of samples’ reaction (39.9%) was to calm the aggressive person. Furthermore, most of them (61.2%) supposed that providing educational course of violence control and 59.6% thought that providing a management system to report control is necessary. Psychiatric nurses permanently exposed to a variety of physical and verbal violence. Providing function for prevention is suggested.