ABSTRACT
According to the International Labour Organization, workplace aggression includes any action, incident, or behavior that deviates from the norm and threatens, harms, and/or injures an individual in their work environment. Health professionals—particularly nurses—are more frequently exposed to the risk of attack by patients, family members, and visitors to the workplace compared to other professional groups. The purpose of this study was to investigate the risk factors that may trigger aggression towards nurses by patients or their companions in the work environment, the consequences and management strategies. Furthermore, it contributes to highlighting this major social problem and to provide the impetus for further research. The methodology involved a review of contemporary research studies from the international literature indexed in the PubMed and Google Scholar databases. The inclusion criteria required that studies be published within the last fifteen years and written in English or Greek. The risk factors that were found to be significantly associated with the occurrence of aggression toward nurses by patients or their companions in the workplace include: (a) individual characteristics of the nurses (e.g., gender, age, work experience, level of education, etc.) (b) individual characteristics of the perpetrators (e.g., gender, age, unemployment, history of aggressive behavior, etc.) and (c) organizational characteristics of the healthcare environment (e.g., type of workplace, high workload, insufficient staffing levels etc.). However, a thorough review of the international literature revealed that aggression towards nurses is a major social phenomenon that seriously affects public health and the quality of services provided, and therefore requires immediate action.
Keywords: aggression, consequences, nurses, risk factors
