Workers asked to report on-job violence
Campaign aims to raise awareness that aggressive acts ‘shouldn’t be normalized’
A campaign raising awareness of violence against health-care workers in Saskatchewan is calling for health professionals to report violent incidents instead of considering them a regular part of the job.
The I Will Report campaign video was released on Friday, featuring several health-care workers sharing stories of violence they’ve experienced at the hands of patients and their families, and how these incidents often go unreported.
These violent incidents can be verbal violence like threats, or physical violence like being punched or kicked — whether done intentionally or unintentionally.
“When we were taking a look at some of the hard data, the numbers weren’t necessarily lining up with what we’re hearing about in terms of the type of violence and the escalation of violence,” said Sandra Cripps, CEO of the Saskatchewan Association for Safe Workplaces in Health (SASWH) and campaign initiator.
“That’s what made us kind of move in on recognizing that it’s incredibly under-reported and we need to do something about that ... The I Will Report campaign is our way of trying to increase awareness that violence and acts of aggression in health care shouldn’t be normalized.”
Right now, SASWH gets incident report information from the Saskatchewan Workers Compensation Board, but Cripps said on-site reports would be more valuable because they provide “in-themoment” information that could be used to more clearly identify problem areas.
“I’ve done presentations for many organizations in health care and do a poll of the room and ask people to stand who have experienced violence or aggression as part of their career, and just about everybody in those audiences stood up. That’s astounding. And that number is not depicted in the statistics that we’re seeing,” she said.
Severe violent instances usually get reported, but the smaller daily instances often aren’t, said Cripps, and that’s what this campaign aims to change.
The information from these smaller events is needed to identify problem areas in the health-care system and introduce controls to reduce the risk to staff.
“It’s still violence. It’s still not part of the job, and we can’t normalize it to be part of the job,” she said.
The campaign also includes a couple of workshops for health employers on how to use the risk assessment being introduced. It is also part of a larger provincial violence prevention framework and strategy that has been in the works for the last two years.
Cripps hopes the video will impact the health-care system from the groundup.
“We’re hoping that a video like this would be used in new hire orientation in the health-care system, maybe even with students going into health-care careers,” she said.