• Juan Manuel Cánovas Pallarés, José Antonio Ruiz-Hernández, Inmaculada Galián-Muñoz, Dolores Beteta Fernández, Manuel Pardo Ríos, and Bartolomé Llor-Esteban.
• Servicio de Emergencias Sanitarias de la Comunidad Valenciana, España. Facultad de Enfermería, Universidad Católica de Murcia (UCAM), España.
• Emergencias. 2023 Oct 1; 35 (5): 353358353-358.

ObjectivesWorkplace violence of any type is influenced by multiple factors and leads to physiological, psychological, social, and organizational change. Emergency and other urgent care settings have assault rates up to 5-fold higher than other health care settings. This study aimed to analyze the consequences of physical and nonphysical violence on health care and support personnel in hospital emergency departments.Material And MethodsCross-sectional descriptive analysis of responses to a 121-item survey of 584 health care and support workers in 12 Spanish hospital emergency departments. We analyzed the magnitude of the problem with a two-step self-clustering method and then assessed the associations between variables and workplace violence.ResultsTwo groups were identified. The first consisted of 298 cases with high mean (SD) scores for nonphysical assaults (51.5 [7.9]) and low scores for physical violence (4.8 [2.9]). The second group consisted of 285 cases with intermediate scores for nonphysical assaults (27.1 [8.4]) and low scores for physical violence (3.4 [1.3]).ConclusionEmergency departments have incidents of nonphysical workplace violence more often than physical violence. Emergency personnel with high exposure to workplace violence, particularly nonphysical assaults, experience physiological, psychosocial, and organizational changes.

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