NHS workforce suffers 56,000 assaults in a year

Title – NHS workforce suffers 56,000 assaults in a year
Source – The Daily Mail
Date – 07-06-2008

The claim by the Department of Health that assaults on NHS staff have fallen every year since 2004 is hardly reassuring when the figures still indicate 56,000 assaults or one every ten minutes. Other figures in recent years have indicated an assault every seven minutes, but the most worrying fact is that everyone who has ever worked in the health sector knows the figure is actually much higher. The fact is that many doctors and nurses and others working in the health sector simply do not report all the assaults against them.

So as much as the authorities should be examining how more is not being done to reduce the number of assaults, they should concentrate just as much in examining why more assault or a higher percentage of assaults are not being reported.

The first place they should look is the number of assaults resulting in prosecutions. Out of 56,000 only 869 cases resulted in criminal conviction. That tells us that only one in every 65 assaults are successfully prosecuted. When staff are already overworked they may well feel that even reporting an assault is not worth the trouble with such a small chance of anything being done about it. After all if there are 153 reported assaults each and every day and yet only 2.3 of these result in prosecution then it might seem like a futile exercise. Add to this that the actual number of assaults is much higher and you can understand the reluctance.

What we should worry about is that there seems to be an attitude growing (rather than declining) that assault is something that those working within the NHS have to accept as ‘part of the job’ and it is this assumption and attitude that breeds a reluctance to report.

The NHS and the government have to empower their staff to reverse these trends and to realise the benefit of reporting so that we get a real picture of the dire situation with violence in their workplace. On a parallel strategy the need for proactive training for staff within the NHS on how to effectively deal and resolve conflict in their workplace needs to be embraced and for more volatile working environments and especially the lone workers within the NHS more advanced training should be provided. The key to this training which the government made a key objective is that it is not just ticking a box, but is actually effective. To be effective staff have to be given the time to complete the training and the training needs to prove itself by being appropriate for the working environment.

Our Conflict Management and Resolution courses (CMR) are developed through a training needs analysis for each client to reflect their specific working environment. They vary from one to two days depending on the findings of our research and can be complimented for high risk environments by our Physical Intervention course (PI) which uses easy to learn and easy to remember, low-impact, disengagement and break-away techniques to allow candidates to work with more confidence and more safely in their workplace.

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