[Sentinel events in mental health: violent acts against operators in SPDC]

Actually, a lot of mental health services in Italy don't give comparable informations about professional risks evaluation, as violent acts against operators during their work activity in Psychiatric services. The most frequent surveys are those derived from medical reports of hospitals (ISTAT modules). However, these surveys are not available to make an analysis purposive for prevention: often the medical reports are incomplete or they are not fill out. Moreover, the reports are often written for generic causes, so they couldn't support quality indicators. On the contrary, the number and the characteristics of violent acts, evaluated with standardized instruments and shared with other services, give informations those could implement the constitution of Quantitative Indicators and support quality indicators. However, our opinion is that cards of free descriptions are not sufficient to evaluate violent acts, because they can be filled out briefly, without attention to important items, as which in the SOAS-R Rating Scale and in two Scales we suggest: a card of anamnestic interview and a card for evaluation of organizing parameters. Essential and inalienable aspect is the obligatoriness of the report, which serves to make the operators to be more unafraid during work time, and can obviate the problem of subjective behaviour of larger tolerance in an operator than in others, and this fact could make invaluable also quality indicators.