Prevalence of lateral violence in nurse workplace: a systematic review and meta-analysis

The prevalence of inter-nurse lateral violence (LV) reported in current studies is inconsistent, ranging from 7% to 83%. The purpose of this study is to quantify the prevalence of LV in nurses' workplaces.

Systematic review and meta-analysis. Cochrane, PubMed, Embase, CINAHL, CNKI and Wanfang databases were searched for relevant studies (up to 27 January 2021). We included cross-sectional, case-control or cohort studies in which both abusers and victims were nurses. Studies that did not provide specific data on abusers were excluded. Stata V.16.0 was used for statistical analysis. Fixed-effect or random-effect model was adopted according to heterogeneity, which was evaluated by Cochran's Q and I² values. The main indicator was LV prevalence. Sensitivity analysis, subgroup analysis and meta-regression were performed to investigate the sources of heterogeneity.

A total of 14 studies with 6124 nurses were included. Further, 13 articles with 5745 nurses were included in the meta-analysis, and the pooled prevalence of LV among nurses was 33.08% (95% CI: 23.41% to 42.75%, p<0.05; I²=99.0%). The remaining one study containing 370 samples reported that the prevalence of inter-nurse LV was 7.92%. Subgroup analysis showed that region, sample size, sampling, study's quality, response rate and publication time might not be the sources of heterogeneity. Meta-regression indicated that sample size had the main influence on model heterogeneity. Egger's test showed the existence of publication bias (p=0.03).

The prevalence of inter-nurse LV is high in nurse workplace. It is suggested that scholars pay more attention to the cultural differences of inter-nurse LV between regions in the future. This study has the following limitations: there is a lack of studies on LV prevalence in many countries; lack of standard assessment tools; no grey literature was searched.