Violence against doctors, a serious concern for healthcare organizations to ponder about

Aggression and Violence against primary care physicians is reportedly common in Pakistan but there is no any documented study to-date on this burning issue.

A formed written questionnaire was distributed among 769 primary care physicians aged 31 ± 7.68 years. Apart from the demographic data, the questionnaire included questions regarding the level of safety that primary care physicians felt during their work setups and on-call duties, along with the experience of aggression against them by the perpetrators & the support provided by the hospital management in such cases.

Response rate was 68% i.e. 524 physicians agreed to participate in the study. It was found that majority (85%) of the physicians has faced mild events, 62% have faced moderate events and roughly 38% were subjected to severe violence. Some physicians revealed more than one form of aggression being faced by them in 12 months preceding months which makes the collective percentage greater than 100%. Verbal abuse is the most frequent type of mistreatment faced by the doctors from the patients or their attendants.

A considerable number of physicians participated have faced mild violence in which verbal abuse was commonest; followed by moderate and severe events.