Workplace Violence Experiences and Nurse-Reported Impact on Care in Emergency Departments: A Cross-Sectional Study
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Objective: To describe Workplace violence (WPV) related experiences among emergency-department nurses and their unadjusted association with nurses' perceived adverse impact of violence on care processes.
Methods and Materials: A cross-sectional descriptive-correlational study included 223 purposively sampled nurses from four teaching hospitals in Babylon Governorate, Iraq (28 December 2025-1 February 2026). An Arabic study-specific questionnaire assessed WPV-related items and a 10-item nurse-reported care-impact scale. Because WPV items combined exposure, consequences, and organizational perceptions and lacked a fixed recall period and explicit unexposed category, results are descriptive rather than prevalence estimates. Analyses used Spearman correlation, Mann-Whitney U, Kruskal-Wallis, and Holm correction.
Findings: Verbal violence was the most frequently recorded type (59.2%); patients' relatives were the most frequent source (63.7%), and workload/staff shortage was the most frequent perceived cause (63.2%). The care-impact mean was 2.18. The original 20-item WPV burden index had a small unadjusted association with care impact (r = .235, p < .001); verbal-domain r = .145 (p = .030), while physical-domain r = .053 (p = .434). After Holm correction, sex, years of experience, and hospital remained associated with the original WPV score; age did not.
Conclusion: The study-specific WPV burden index showed a small, unadjusted association with nurses' perceived adverse impact on care. Findings are neither causal nor objective quality-of-care estimates and support use of clearer event-based measurement and participant-level adjusted analyses in future research.
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