Understanding trends in workplace violence in health care or other sectors relies, in part, on the collection of reliable and valid indicators of the incidence of workplace violence gathered in a consistent way over time. In 2018, the Province of Ontario will start collecting the number of workplace violence events (annually) as a new mandatory indicator within each hospital’s quality improvement plan. However, we currently do not know what proportion of workplace violence incidents (as defined under the Occupational Health and Safety Act) are captured by each hospital’s reporting system. We also lack information on reasons for not reporting workplace violence incidents, which could be integrated into approaches to improve overall workplace violence reporting in the health-care sector.
In this presentation, Dr. Peter Smith of the Institute for Work & Health provides findings from a survey in late 2017 of over 1,000 workers in six Ontario hospitals. The survey focused on the incidence, reporting and consequences of workplace violence. Smith also discusses the implications of these findings on the interpretation of the mandatory indicator of workplace violence in Ontario.
