Verbal abuse against nurses in hospitals in Iran

The rising rate of doing behavioral violence to people working in health-care centers is a major problem for nurse’s population. This study was run with the aim of ascertaining how much nurses working in hospitals all over the country (Iran) are under verbal violence and finding out its relation with some individual and environmental factors. This study is a descriptive cross-sectional one which was run with 1317 nurses as the participants in hospitals all over the country of Iran during 2007. Data collection was done through self-report questionnaire. 87.4% of nurses experienced verbal violence at least once in their working surroundings during the last six months. Most of the verbal violence (64.4%) was done by patient's relatives, (44.2%) between 7:30 am to 14:30 pm in the patient's room (48.3%). Results show that only 35.9% of verbal violence was reported by nurses. Investigating the frequency of verbal violence, the results of correlation analysis (x²) showed that there is a significant relationship between verbal violence and variables such as age (P=0.009), sex (P=0.001), job experience (P=0.007), work hours (P=0.001) and job rank (P=0.048). Since lots of violence happens and the risk factors were investigated, more attention must be paid to this issue and the necessary steps must be taken in this regard. The findings of this study can be helpful to reduce, prevent and control the violence to nurses.