Safety Chat Guidebook: A Risk Assessment Component

(Revised May 2009)

The Safety Chat Guidebook: A Risk Assessment Component outlines how to conduct a safety chat risk assessment for violence in healthcare facilities. Safety chats are interviews with workers in high-priority departments to identify current practices/controls surrounding violence and opportunities to improve them. The Safety Chat Guidebook provides step-by-step instructions for interviews with workers to identify current procedures and gaps in controls, including how to free workers to conduct the safety chat, the estimated costs for conducting a safety chat risk assessment, and who would be responsible for conducting the safety chat. The approach described is innovative because it assesses and supports clinical practice, builds local risk assessment capacity, and keeps the process focused on implementing control measures which will reduce risk.

Safety chats should be used to complement a comprehensive risk assessment which would include a review of worksite history and the work environment. When an organization is considering implementing the safety chat process, it needs to consider how it relates to other components of a violence prevention plan; a safety chat and risk assessment is the first of many steps in preventing violence.

In order for the safety chat process to be successful, it must be a planned and strategic activity i.e. part of a larger violence prevention plan. If your organization is interested in implementing the safety chat and has occupational health and safety resources, please contact your Regional Violence Prevention Committee for more information or contact

Andrea Lam
Program Project Manager, Violence Prevention

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Behaviour Documentation Toolkit

(Revised June 2009)

The purposes of the Behaviour Documentation Toolkit are to:

• Assist healthcare workers report escalating anxious, aggressive, or violent patient behaviour, incorporating documenting of violence/aggression indicators into clinical practice.
• Link violent/aggressive behaviour reporting with control measures.

The Toolkit contains three different options for charting less serious or repeated behaviours that would otherwise go unreported, and to identify any escalation that could indicate an upcoming major outburst.

The use of the Behaviour Documentation Toolkit is meant to complement existing reporting forms/processes and may be adapted for each healthcare setting. The goal of documenting behaviour is to encourage consistent documentation and communication of potentially aggressive behaviour so that changes/escalation in a patient can be identified and prevented through changes in care planning.

If you have had the opportunity to use the Behaviour Observation Sheet or have developed your own behaviour documentation tool, we would like to hear your feedback/experiences with behaviour documentation. Please contact

Andrea Lam

Program Project Manager, Violence Prevention

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