For too long, assaults on hospital staff, particularly in critical settings such as the Emergency Department, have been making headlines with a dramatic escalation. Anaao Assomed surveyed its members and disseminated the results on social media to all healthcare managers, based on a representative sample of professionals.
What emerges with alarming clarity is the enormity of the data: 81% of respondents reported being victims of physical or verbal assaults; of these, 23% reported physical assaults, 77% verbal assaults, and 75% witnessed assaults on colleagues. This data is more than concerning and demands immediate initiatives to protect healthcare professionals.
Surprisingly, to those not working daily in hospitals, the data shows that assaults are committed by patients (including psychiatric inpatients) in only about half of the cases, while relatives are responsible for 42.3% of the violence, especially in the Emergency Department. The climate of fear and resignation highlighted by the Assomed survey is further evidenced by another distressing statistic: 69% of healthcare workers do not report their assailant. This indicates a lack of real trust in a possible change in the working environment.
The vast majority of healthcare workers handle verbal or physical violence alone or with the help of colleagues, calling law enforcement only in the most severe cases. What tools do we have to curb the increasing aggression in the Emergency Department, improve patient flow, and at the same time, the working conditions of those who often save our lives?
Certainly, substantial funding or even fixed police presences in the most problematic areas would be needed, but to truly extinguish the spark of aggression, especially from the relatives of patients, some effective solutions already exist.
Waiting times in the Emergency Department are often exacerbated by the phenomenon of “boarding,” a complex issue with disastrous consequences: – For patients: increased morbidity, longer hospital stays, increased mortality, and greater suffering for those waiting on stretchers in the hallways; – For staff: increased stress and burnout, reduced capacity to respond to emergencies and disasters; – For the system: ambulance diversion or blockage, increased waiting times in the Emergency Department.
This phenomenon has very high costs in terms of care, leading to longer hospital stays and posing the main threat to the quality of emergency services, affecting the timeliness of care, morbidity/mortality rates, the potential for medical errors, and ambulance blockages.
TapMyLife’s Emergency Department and staff safety module focuses precisely on these critical aspects in the Emergency Department with an advanced dedicated platform: flow monitoring, stretcher tracking, staff safety, and communication with relatives. The data collected over these years show how the introduction of safety and traceability systems in the Emergency Department leads to greater department efficiency and a significant increase in safety standards for staff.
Tracking the patient’s journey in the Emergency Department, in addition to ensuring significant advantages in terms of department efficiency, effectiveness, and safety, offers relatives (remember that relatives cause about half of the assaults on healthcare staff) a dedicated caregiver app to follow their loved one’s journey with information viewable on smartphones or dedicated panels, automatic notifications on Android or iOS apps in full compliance with GDPR regulations via QR code or personal PIN.
While awaiting a system overhaul, immediate action can be taken to save a particularly critical patient: the Emergency Department, a place that must return to being one of care and not conflict.
