Safety Assessment of the Physician Experience: A Study of Workplace Violence in a Primary Care Setting

The prevalence of workplace violence in primary care settings internationally is high; however, data about workplace violence in US primary care settings is scant.

To describe workplace violence in a US urban academic primary care center.

Cross-sectional design.

Internal medicine resident and attending physicians, who were surveyed between June 2022 and August 2022.

Physician characteristics, direct experiences of workplace violence, witnessed episodes of workplace violence, feelings of safety.

A total of 93 attending and resident physicians completed the survey with a response rate of 70.5%. Most of the respondents identified as white and female. More than half of the respondents identified themselves as attending physicians. A minority (10.8%) of respondents reported having experienced physical workplace violence within the last 5 years and 46.2% reported having experienced verbal workplace violence within the last year. In our sample, white physicians were more likely than non-white physicians to experience physical WPV (OR = 7.16 [95% CI, 0.87-59.2], p = 0.04). Eighty percent of respondents witnessed physical workplace violence in their careers. About half of the respondents witnessed verbal workplace violence at least once in the last year (50.5%), and we found that attending physicians (OR = 4.09 [95% CI, 1.68-9.96], p = 0.002) and white physicians (OR = 3.69 [95% CI, 1.5-9.0], p = 0.003) were more likely to witness verbal WPV in the past year. Forty-two percent of respondents reported feeling unsafe at work at least once a year, with women primary care physicians more likely than males to report feeling unsafe (OR = 2.42 [95% CI, 1.0-5.8], p = 0.04).

Small sample size, single institution, short study period.

WPV was a commonly witnessed event by primary care physicians, and women physicians were more likely to feel unsafe at work.