Healthcare and social-service workers face the threat of violence on the job every day. Read about a NIOSH study that’s assessing risks, and review OSHA guidelines for protecting employees.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the rate of violence against home healthcare and social-service workers is far higher than the rate for the working population at large. Injurious assaults on all workers occur at a rate of 2 per year for every 10,000 workers, while the rate for home healthcare and social service workers is 15 assaults per year for every 10,000 workers.
Ironically, home healthcare and social-service workers are often assaulted by the very people they are trying to help. Other times they are assaulted or robbed going to or coming back from their assignments. Often a worker is even killed on the job, like the Kentucky social worker who was killed while bringing an infant to its mother for visitation.
NIOSH Study Looks at Risks
The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) is currently studying the risk of job-related violence for home healthcare workers, looking in particular at their risk of assault at the hands of a patient. About 5 percent of home healthcare workers surveyed by NIOSH reported having been assaulted (hit, kicked, pinched, shoved, or bitten) by a patient one or more times during the previous 12 months.
The survey finds that workers are at increased risk of assault when they:
- Are involved in direct patient-handling activities, such as lifting, moving, bathing, or dressing patients
- Care for patients with dementia
- Feel threatened by violence from others in and around the patients’ homes
Additional risk factors for client-on-worker violence that NIOSH has previously identified include:
- Working with clients who are mentally unstable or have criminal histories
- Working with clients who take, or fail to take, medications that alter their mental status
- The presence of firearms or other weapons in the home
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Guidelines for Protecting Workers
OSHA guidelines provide strategies for protecting home healthcare and social-service workers, including:
Define unsafe situations. Teach workers to recognize situations that merit leaving the area and calling for emergency assistance, such as the presence of individuals who are drunk or high, make threatening statements, or in some other way give the worker an uneasy feeling.
Provide clear directions. Workers going into bad neighborhoods should know exactly where the patient lives so they don’t go to the wrong house by mistake or need to stop for directions in an unsafe location.
Maintain contact. Workers should carry charged cell phones at all times and should report in at regular intervals (such as on arrival and departure from clients’ homes). They should have emergency numbers on speed dial.
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Provide backup. In some cases, it may be advisable to send two workers.
Teach personal safety practices.Workers should dress plainly (uniformed home healthcare workers have been targeted by criminals seeking drugs or paraphernalia), leave valuables at home, and always lock their cars.
Tomorrow, we’ll talk some more about workplace violence and an interesting electronic device that can help protect workers of all kinds—whether they’re in the field or in the workplace.
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