Workplace violence, burnout and health of nursing professionals in hospital setting

Abstract

Violence threatens well-being in general and is internationally reckoned as a hazard to be eradicated like any other disease for being disruptive to workers, organizations, and communities. In the healthcare context, specifically, it undermines the very foundations of health systems and impacts critically workers and patient care. Yet, the mechanisms through which this impact occurs, depending on the types of violence, its targets, and its shapes, are still unclear. The current thesis aims to characterize lateral violence in the most impacted health professional group, nurses, the impacts observed depending on exposure and personal features, and the pathways of such an impact considering different types of exposure and types of violence. Results point to a high exposure of nurses to violence from coworkers, especially of the personal type, such as gossiping and person-directed attacks, confirming the phenomenon depicted in literature as part of the sink or swim paradigm in nursing, being common in against male nurses, and those less experienced. A negative impact is found on psychological and physical health, and cluster analysis found significantly lower intrinsic job satisfaction and a more severe impact on health among those with greater exposure to lateral violence. Our results further support that reiterated and prolonged experiences of both user and coworker violence are strong predictors of burnout, with emotional exhaustion rising as the most prevalent deleterious outcome, and with a mediating role to highly impairing anxious, depressive, or somatization disorders. Hopefully, such conclusions pose the theoretical backbone of intervention and prevention programs that raise awareness and protect professionals, towards the improvement of occupational health in one of the most crucial and challenging settings.