The PVPSC Violence Prevention Workshop was held February 11 and 12, 2009 at the HEU Provincial Office in Burnaby, BC. The workshop featured a mixture of presentations and breakout sessions led by facilitators. The workshop was organized by OHSAH and funded through a grant from the Nursing Policy Management Committee.

The purpose of the PVSPC Violence Prevention Stakeholder Workshop was to obtain feedback on the practicality of several recommended behaviour documentation and risk assessment resources. Workshop participants were also asked for their ideas on how to develop creative implementation strategies appropriate to different sectors in healthcare. The feedback for improving the materials gathered during the workshop were incorporated before the province-wide promotion of violence prevention materials.

Overall, the workshop was a success. We were able to:

• Obtain practical feedback on the Safety Chat Guidebook and Behaviour Documentation Toolkit.
• Offer participants information about current violence prevention projects.
• Provide an opportunity to network and share knowledge and experience with violence prevention.

The main themes of participants’ feedback during the breakout sessions on the PVPSC violence prevention resources included:

• The need for overall organizational culture change with respect to violence.
• The need for communication and buy-in when a violence prevention program/tool is introduced.
• The need to adapt resources to all care settings.

For the Safety Chat Guidebook, participants:

• Identified a need to adapt the questions to include non-clinical staff, staff that may travel into the department, contract staff, and physicians.
• Recommended that the preamble and questions be shortened/simplified, particularly for workers who speak English as a second language.
• Suggested communicating and promoting the safety chat with the department before conducting safety chats.
• Proposed ideas on how questions could be modified for home and community care, and added safety chat questions about training, post-incident follow-up, incident reporting, and working alone.

For the Behaviour Documentation Toolkit, participants:

• Recognized the benefits of behaviour documentation and acknowledged the challenges to implementing the behaviour documentation process in each healthcare setting.
• Recommended that before any behaviour documentation tool is introduced, organizational support must be obtained and an education program/campaign about the benefits of reporting/documenting violent behaviour, and how to report/document violent behaviour needs to be implemented. The process of reporting/documenting must also be clearly defined for each individual in an organization such that every person in the reporting/documentation process is held accountable.
• Identified the need to: include information about potential interventions for aggressive behaviour with the behaviour documentation tools, simplify the language used in the tools, incorporate the behaviour documentation tools/concept with existing forms/processes and make the terminology used in the tools consistent.
• Suggested ways to improve and modify the behaviour documentation tools/process so that they are applicable to long term care, home and community care and acute care settings.

Click here for the 2009 PVPSC Violence Prevention Stakeholder Workshop Report

Approximately 100 participants attended the workshop, including forty union representatives and forty employer representatives invited by the PVPSC. Ten of the employer and union representatives represented affiliate facilities. In addition, fourteen PVPSC members and five Violence Prevention Advisory Group members also attended the workshop. Participants came from diverse geographic locations throughout the province, with experience from a range of care settings. There was representation from front-line patient care workers, occupational health and safety specialists, supervisors/managers, joint occupational health and safety committee members, and Regional Violence Prevention Committee members.

 

Click here for more PVPSC Violence Prevention Stakeholder Workshop resources