Tools for assessing the risk of violence in the emergency room: a narrative review of the literature

Introduction: Emergency departments are high-risk workplaces for violence. To date, in Italy, interventions to prevent verbal or physical abuse against hospital staff are not yet widely or consistently implemented and, often, their effectiveness remains uncertain. The objective of this paper is to search the literature for validated tools for identifying the risk of violence in emergency rooms and to understand their effectiveness.

Materials and Methods: A literature review was conducted through consultation of the Medline, Web of Science, and Scopus databases. The research was carried out in the period September-October 2022. Studies were sought that analyzed tools for assessing the risk of violence in the emergency room, published in the last 5 years, in English and Italian.

Results: Eight studies were included in this review. The prevention tools found were structured to try to identify people at risk of violence or to assess the presence of risk factors in the care environment and in the organization of the provision of services.

Discussion: The measures of potential aggressors are, overall, moderately sensitive for predicting potentially violent patients and highly specific for predicting nonviolent patients.

Conclusions: These assessment tools have helped healthcare workers reduce the number of violent incidents and increase their awareness and safety, according to studies in this paper.