Abstract

Objectives: The Emergency Department (ED) is one of the most important places in a hospital in which patients are full of pain and stress because of its hectic nature. Consequently, there are a lot of quarrels and fights in the emergency department. This study intends to assess the effect of exhibition of educational messages as a way to decrease the violence in the Emergency Room (ER).

Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional prospective survey at the Emergency Room (ER) of Shariati hospital of Tehran in September 2016. Data collection was carried out via distributing a qualitative questionnaire among the Emergency Department (ED) staff at baseline and 3 months after the educational intervention. We measured the total and mean number of various types of violence per survey. We utilized SPSS software version 16 in analysis of data using Mann-Whitney Test.

Results: The analysis showed 47.5% verbal violence before the intervention vs 60% after that (p-value=0.598), 20.8% financial violence pre- ervention versus 43.8% post intervention (p-value=0.253), both of which were notsignificant statistically; however, physical violence considerably decreased from 83.9% to 47.6% during the study (p-value=0.01). During the semi-structured interviews with personnel, it was found that this presentation had some positive effects on controlling the stress of the environment practically, although it did not appear in the analysis.

Conclusion: This type of public education in the hospital does not seem to be independently effective in reducing the violence in the Emergency Room (ER). According to the results, most violence indexes, except Physical violence, have not been mitigated after the intervention significantly. Perhaps, it could be more efficient by using audiovisual media, animation, and other captivating methods.

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