Violence Against Frontline Emergency Nurses During Pandemic of COVID-19 in Guilan: A Cross-Sectional Study

BackgroundViolence in the workplace is one of the most important risk factors worldwide. Nurses are always exposed to all kinds of violence due to their presence and activity in medical centers and direct contact with patients and their companions, as well as exposure to various stressors. The aim of this study was to determine the violence against nurses working in Razi educational and medical center in Rasht, Guilan.MethodsThe present study was an analytical cross-sectional study that was performed on 112 nurses working in Razi educational and medical centers in Rasht by convenience sampling method. The instrument used includes a questionnaire to assess workplace violence in medical settings, which has been used in several Iranian studies and has been psychometric assessed by Najafi et al, In Iran. After collecting the data and entering into the SPSS software version 22, they will be evaluated through descriptive and inferential statistical tests (Chi-square, independent t-test and Fisher's exact test). The level of significance was considered as P<0.05.ResultsThe findings of this study showed that 11.1% of nurses experienced physical violence and 55.7% of them experienced verbal violence. Verbal violence is often caused by the patient's companions and physical violence is often caused by the patient, and in the majority of cases, those who did not report the violence attributed it to the uselessness of the report. In addition, the findings showed that there is a statistically significant relationship between education level and verbal violence (p = 0.02) and between work status (p = 0.02) and marital status (p = 0.02) with physical violence.ConclusionThe results of the study show that during the pandemic of COVID-19, verbal and physical violence for nurses occurred in several occasions, which requires the authorities to take effective measures to reduce the incidence of violence in hospitals.