A criminological examination of violence against physician

It is an undeniable fact that violence against doctors is a public health problem. In this study, it is aimed to define situational factors that may increase or decrease possibility of violance committed against doctors together with variables related to victims within the scope of routine activities theory. This study is a cross-sectional study using the easily accessible state sampling method, one of the improbable sampling designs, and is a descriptive research that has the quality of quantitative research. The data is compiled by using a survey form created between January 20, 2020 and February 20, 2020 on Google Forms. The research is composed of the doctors who are members of a healthcare professionals solidarity groups on social media platforms. According to the information obtained from the solidarity group moderators to whom we could reach; 2000 doctors currenty working in different regions, differend branches, different seniority are the subject of the research. Since it was aimed to reach the entire population, sampling was not used, the survey form was sent to all doctors who are members of professional solidarity groups and 644 answers were received. Analyses were completed with 443 participants by excluding the data of 1 participant who stated that he/she was not working actively and 200 participants who stated that they were not exposed or subjected to violance. Within the scope of the study, a survey form, that was revised based on the data, the sociodemografic information prepared in light of the literature and the Act of Violance Form (Arnetz, 1998) containing the questions regarding violance suffers, was used. The results were analysed with descriptive statistics, chi-square test and T test in IBM SPSS 22.0 programme. All measurements were made according to .05 significance level and it has been interpreted by using Cramer's V as the effect size measurement. The physicians participating in this study were most frequently exposed to verbal violence, most frequently in the outpatient clinic, during examination and during daytime working hours. More than half of them did not report the incident to legal authorities and the reason for this is that they most often think that there will be no result from the judicial process. According to the participants, the violence was mostly caused by senseless patient relatives and it was concluded that all of those results were found to be consistent with previous studies. In the study, in accordance with the literature, it was determined that physicians who were exposed to violence only once were frequently subjected to the violence of patient's relatives, and those who were exposed more than once were frequently exposed to the violence of both the patient and the patient's relatives. It was observed that verbal violence was more common in cases where violence was committed by patients and their relatives, and verbal and physical violence was more common in cases where only the patient's relatives used violence. In analysis of the hypotheses created in terms of a suitable target, although a significant relationship was found between the frequency of violence that physicians were exposed to and the time of the act of violence or physician's relationship with the patients after the violence, no significant relationship was found between frequency of violence and the gender, age, title, department, weekly working hours, overtime patterns of physicians. In the study; there was a significant relationship between the type of violence and the variables of gender and age, consistent with the literature. It was observed that if physicians were only the victims of verbal violence, the frequency of incidents was higher in female physicians than male physicians while the frequency of cases where male physicians are victims of both verbal and physical violence is higher than that of women. In examining the relationships between the variables regarding the presence of active guardians and the frequency of violence; no significant relationship was found between the frequency of violence and whether there were security personnel, white code and security cameras and whether the physicians were alone during the violence. In addition, a meaningful result could not be reached in the analysis between the variables of white code and being alone during violence and the type of violence. However, it was observed that there is a significant relationship between the presence of a white code in the institution where physicians work and the type of violence. It was detected that the physicians who do not know whether there is a white code system in their institution are exposed to verbal violence more. In addition to providing partial support for understanding the factors that explain doctors' exposure to violence, this study also makes an important contribution to the growing literature on routine activity theory. Furthermore, it has been observed that using the limitations of this theoretical approach alone is not sufficient. Key Words: Violance againt doctors, rouitine activities theory, situational crime prevention.