Workplace Violence Training for Nurses

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Research has shown that nurses are at very high risk of being victims of workplace violence. The American Association of Colleges of Nursing issued a Position Paper in 1999 emphasizing the inclusion of violence- related content as essential content in nursing curricula, yet training remains incidental. The American Nurses Association, the International Council of Nurses and the American Academy of Nursing, as well as health care labor unions, have called for increased re search to identify effective interventions. Workplace Violence Training for Nurses is a two-part multi-media training package for professional (registered) nurses working in a hospital setting. It includes a self-paced web-based learning program to help nu rses understand, assess, prevent, and respond to violence in the workplace. The curriculum will make extensive use of video to share expert opinions, victims' experiences and to provide visual case studies to demonstrate effective strategies for assessment , prevention and response, thus allowing for behavior modeling. The program will be divided into five stand-alone modules covering various aspects of nursing workplace violence. Self-administered tests for each module will help to track acquisition of esse ntial knowledge, attitudes, and skills. Continuing education credits will be awarded to program graduates. A Workshop Leader's Toolkit will help nurse educators conduct workshops (e.g., in-service training) on workplace violence. The toolkit will consist o f the five modules from the web-based learning program, each on its own DVD-ROM. Also included will be a workshop leader's guide, learning assessment tools and a DVD containing extra video case studies not offered in the web-based program. Providing the tr aining in this format will enable trainers and learners without high speed internet access (esp. rural hospitals and providers) to participate in the workplace training program. Workshop graduates will be able to complete on-line testing for continuing edu cation credit. In Phase I, the producers developed the curriculum and produced and tested a home page and a functional prototype of the web training. In Phase II, the curriculum content will be fleshed out and the training fully developed and evaluated usi ng focus groups representative of the target audiences. Evaluators will use well- documented qualitative techniques to analyze focus group data. This project will advance the knowledge and training of hospital-based nurses by (a) helping them to understand , assess, prevent, and respond to violence in the workplace and (b) providing tools to help nurse trainers conduct workshops on workplace violence. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: Research has shown that nurses are at very high risk of being victims of workplace violence. The American Association of Colleges of Nursing issued a Position Paper in 1999 emphasizing the inclusion of violence-related content as essential content in nursing curricula, yet training remains incidental. The American Nurses Association, the International Council of Nurses and the American Academy of Nursing, as well as health care labor unions, have called for increased research to identify effective interventions. This project will advance the knowledge and training of hospital-based nurses by (a) helping them to understand, assess, prevent, and respond to violence in the workplace and (b) providing tools to help nurse trainers conduct workshops on workplace violence.