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NURSES' PERCEPTION OF PATIENT AGGRESSION MANAGEMENT - RESEARCH STUDY IN SELECTED SLOVAK HEALTHCARE FACILITIES

Lepiesova, M.

Abstract

Patient aggression against nurses is of increased incidence all over the word including Slovak clinical nursing practice thus there is a tendency to call for implementation of effective strategies to manage it. Usage of the MAVAS instrument to measure nurses' perception of various strategies is underpinned by an assumption that beliefs on causative factors of patient aggression influence the choice of particular management strategies to be used while facing it. The aim of the study was to identify nurses' perception of patient aggression management – to determine what strategies of patient aggression management nurses prefer (use of medication, restraints, or non-physical methods); what is their perception of the frequency of their usage in the workplaces, and what their beliefs on different causative factors of patient aggression are. As a method of data collection, adapted and modified version of MAVAS-L was used in the sample of 247 nurses in selected Slovak healthcare facilities. Nurses prefer use of medications (3.64 ± 1.23) rather than the use of non-physical methods (3.11 ± 1.21) and the use of restraints (3.10 ± 1.53) in patient aggression management. As for the perception of frequency of using various management strategies in the workplaces, nurses consider medications to be used more often (3.64 ± 1.14) than restraints (3.10 ± 1.14), but both are referred to be used in the frequency between “occasionally” to “often” on 6-point frequency scale. Nurses perceive internal factors to be dominant (3.39 ± 1.33) in causation of patient aggression, followed by situational-interactional causative factors (3.28 ± 1.19) and external causative factors (3.09 ± 1.20). There is a strong call for identifying nurses' perception of dominant causative factors of patient aggression to be able to understand how they may influence the tendency to prefer the usage of particular method or strategy to manage it in real conditions of clinical nursing practice. The results of our research study could be considered to be the first step in our efforts to contribute to creation of database concerning the problem of patient aggression in the context of clinical practice in Slovakia that is still insufficient.

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DOI resolver: doi.org/10.5593/SGEMSOCIAL2015/B11/S2.090

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