Psychological Counseling Model Proposal for Reducing Violence in Emergency Services

Abstract

Violence is destructive and abrasive for patients and their relatives as well as for healthcare workers. Violence, which leads to various emotional and physical injuries, job dissatisfaction, and absenteeism, causes fatal mistakes and has a negative impact on service quality. On the other hand, the patient and his relatives may be anxious, nervous, sensitive or inclined to show anger behavior due to the situation they are in. These summarized reasons can bring the healthcare worker and patient, who should be on the same side, and their relatives face to face. However, healthcare professionals and patients share a common goal and have to act together. Accordingly, it is thought that when the causes of violence are eliminated for both groups, violence will decrease to a large extent. In this context, efforts should be made to identify and eliminate the psychological and social reasons that lead people to act aggressively in order to prevent violence in the emergency room. The proposed model aims to build a bridge of compassion between healthcare workers and patients and their relatives, while also providing psychological support to healthcare workers and patients and their relatives, training healthcare workers in communication, compassion, empathy and emotion management, and teaching stress-reducing techniques to prevent violence in emergency services. Various search engines were used in the literature search. The search terms were determined as "violence in an emergency", "causes of violence", "prevention of violence" and "violence in health", but studies involving environmental risk management and security measures were excluded.