Development of the Personal Workplace Safety Instrument for Emergency Nurses

BACKGROUND: Much of the research on violence committed by patients and family members against healthcare providers in the hospital focus on the frequency and severity of incidents plus personal, perpetrator, and hospital characteristics. The literature lacks research on those factors that make healthcare providers in hospitals feel safe from workplace violence committed by patients and family members. OBJECTIVE: The objective of this project is to design an instrument to measure the perceptions of personal safety of emergency nurses in the workplace. METHODS: To develop the Personal Workplace Safety Instrument for Emergency Nurses (PWSI EN) an extensive review of the literature was conducted and recurrent themes identified. Informal focus groups of emergency nurses and discussions with administrators were conducted to confirm these themes. A review by workplace violence experts and a pilot test with emergency nurses was conducted. RESULTS: The instrument has 31 Likert-scale items to measure the factors of workplace countermeasures, patient-nurse interactions, and administrative and judicial support measures. Fifteen demographic questions were developed to measure characteristics of the nurse and hospital. Results of the expert panel review yielded high content validity (cumulative validity index = 0.98). CONCLUSION: The instrument is valid to measure the perceptions of personal safety in the workplace with emergency nurses.