Expanding the Five Urgent Recommendations: Advancing Workplace Safety in Healthcare Settings

ObjectiveThis paper updates the psychiatric mental health (PMH) nursing community regarding the progress of five recommendations for policy and practice to enhance workplace violence (WPV) prevention. This information should be useful to nurses in their efforts to advocate for workplace safety.MethodsA comprehensive search of current literature, organizational action, and national policy relevant to the recommendations are reviewed and discussed to enhance WPV prevention and safety.ResultsWorkplace safety is a critical concern for PMH nurses and has far-reaching implications in PMH nursing settings. While there has been implementation of state policy around WPV, federal legislation remains stalled. The national accreditation standards continue to provide individual institutions guidance around WPV data collection, reporting, and analysis, but these data do not inform national efforts particularly around defining requirements for mechanisms to support healthcare workplace protection. However, recent research continues to document both prevalence and associated conditions/quality metrics. While dashboards are now available for public reporting of select WPV data, nationally the public reporting standards remain the same. Organizing a nursing voice in WPV reporting resulted in interesting exemplars. Thus far, no data are available on efforts to include safety in nursing curricula.ConclusionsThe safety of nurses, particularly PMH nurses, is a multi-faceted problem that will require efforts in regulatory, organizational, educational, and personal behavior change.