The situation of exposure to emergency nurses and determination of coping methods

ABSTRACT İsmail ÖZTAŞ, The Situation of Exposure to Emergency Nurses and Determination of Coping Methods. Predictive Master's Thesis for Master's Program in Nursing Department, Gaziantep 2018. All around the world, the emergency clinics are among the health service areas where violence is most commonly observed. The purpose of this study is to determine how often the emergency nurses are subject to violence coming from the patients and their relatives, and how they handle these conditions. This study was conducted in a descriptive manner. The subjects are 120 emergency clinic nurses (69 females and 51 males). The data were collected between September 1, 2017, and November 30, 2017; through a survey and face-to-face interview. It was determined the 90.0% of the emergency nurses included in the study were subject to violence at least once, and mostly to verbal abuse (94.4%). The verbal abuse included yelling, insulting, threats and swearing. Most of the violence came from patients' relatives and most of the violence occurred between 16:00 and 00:00. The areas where the violence mostly happened was determined to be the corridor of the emergency room, the treatment room and the yellow area. The nurses indicated that the violence mostly resulted from the increased waiting time due to the overcrowdedness of the emergency service (79.6%), and not prioritizing the patient/its relatives (68.5%). Keywords: Emergency service, Nurse, Violence, Handling Violence