In October, we had the pleasure of having Kevin O’Bryant and Debbie Zidank of Vanderbilt University Medical Center host #AskThe Expert discussion on HUB. Kevin and Debbie answered everything and anything related to using RL software to track workplace violence. They shared useful tips and strategies on how they track and report workplace violence and how you can use them, too.
Here are a few questions from the discussion:
Q: What did you set up in RL6 to track workplace violence (WPV)?
Kevin: In 2016, I attended Palooza, and it was great. One of the classes I attended was one that gave instructions on how to create a new section specifically for WPV. It was one of the most useful sessions of Palooza I’ve attended. We were taught how to create the section, provided sample questions to ask, and given the resources so we could take useful info back to our organizations. I applied what I learned from that class, shared it with the Vanderbilt WPV committee. It was well received by that group. Over the a few months we (the WPV committee and myself) developed a similar section in our RL6 environment.
Q: I was wondering if you use RL6 for WPV risk assessments? Legislation in our Province requires this as a major component of WPV prevention
We do not have the same legislative mandate as you but we do have other avenues of assessing our WPV risks. We have a workplace violence prevention committee and meet monthly to discuss all of the claims that we have had by department. We then evaluate what type of training procedures we can put into place to help deal with the different situations. We also keep a record of the departments where the most violence occurs and we go to those departments and talk to them about ways to prevent WPV and steps to take when an event does occur.
Q: What are your GET / SET strategy to promote consistent reporting?
Kevin: We report WPV out on our General Event types of Complaint, Fall, Home Health, Injury/Illness, Property Damage, Safety/Security, and Employee Injury. This is done with a simple yes/no question of “is this a workplace violence event”. If they answer yes then there is an additional section we created for them to complete specifically with regards to WPV. The specific event types for these GET are unchanged. For consistency purposes we have tried keep as many questions as possible dropdown on the WPV section with drop down answers with a reasonable number of choices.
How are you addressing violence against staff from patients and capturing both the person affected and person inflicting the violence in RL?
Kevin: If the event is a safety/security event then we ask the name of the perpetrator. Otherwise we capture this info in the section “who was involved/witnessed/notified”. We also have a question on the classification of the person the committed the violence, with the choices being patient, employee, visitor, or student.
