Greater efforts are required at the hospital level to prioritize the safety of healthcare professionals, particularly those in emergency medicine, a field experiencing a significant decline in applicants, Helen Ouyang, MD, wrote in an Oct. 24 op-ed for The New York Times.
Dr. Ouyang is an emergency physician and associate professor of emergency medicine at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York City. While research does not directly tie waning ED residency applications to workplace violence, Dr. Ouyang cited anecdotal evidence that suggests the two factors may be related.
"What has stayed with me most is not the near miss of a thrown computer or a slur a patient used but a medical student saying to me after he witnessed a violent episode, 'I learned today that I don't want to go into emergency medicine,'" she wrote.
Dr. Ouyang said a multipronged approach is needed to address violence against healthcare workers in emergency departments. While federal and state laws are seen as essential "backstops" to create boundaries and provide a legal framework for addressing violence, hospital leaders must also ramp up efforts to track and understand violent incidents.
Hospitals have started using electronic flags in patient charts to indicate if an individual has threatened or assaulted staff members in the past. This system is used to alert healthcare providers but does not extend beyond individual charts.
Dr. Ouyang argued that hospitals should implement confidential reporting systems that allow employees to formally record the incidents for additional review, similar to how medical errors are tracked.
"Hospital administrators need to then perform thorough dissections of the events to diagnose what went wrong, applying the same rigor as they would to clinical mistakes, and intervene with specific remedies — whether it's bolstering security in certain areas or equipping staff members with personal panic buttons," she wrote.
Read the full op-ed here.