An 18-country review published in International Emergency Nursing, found that one in four emergency department staff members has experienced violence and aggression in the workplace, most commonly from patients, according to an article on the Emergency Medicine News website.

Other studies have suggested that experiencing violence from patients or visitors is a virtually universal experience for ED staff. Healthcare facilities have taken a range of security measures to address the issue.

Jeffrey Ho, a professor of emergency medicine at the University of Minnesota and the chief medical director for Hennepin EMS, is also a deputy sheriff who was asked by his institution to serve as medical director of the security department, a novel approach. “Most hospitals with large security forces look at them as an institutional enterprise that is not part of clinical service,” he said in the article.. “Health care security professionals often don't feel like they have a clinical mission, but it became clear to me that's not true.

“Clinicians call security when things get out of control in a clinical area.... But that's the last thing you want to have happen. That's a failure to identify a potential problem, to appropriately de-escalate, or to use medication. What used to happen after such an incident is that clinicians would do an after-action review and point fingers at security. We brought to the table a root-cause analysis of what led to the behavior, and more often than not, we found clinical reasons for what happened. Patients who hadn't been fed for several hours, or who wanted a blanket and the call button was being ignored, or who couldn't get to the bathroom. By the time we're calling security, that's often a failure of the clinical service line.”

Read the article.