Violence against hospital nurses problem in Hungary

Budapest, April 20 (MTI) – Violence against nurses is frequent in Hungary, daily Magyar Nemzet said on Monday. Only 13 percent of nurses say they have not experienced some form of aggression.

A survey commissioned by the professional college of nurses involving interviews with 2,420 nurses found that 51 percent had experienced up to two instances of violence while an additional 29 percent reported two or more. Fully 7 percent said they were regular victims of violence at the workplace.

Of all the nurses asked, 37 percent had suffered physical violence and nearly 8 percent said they had been subjected to sexual harassment, including verbal harassment, the survey showed.

The nurses reported maltreatment by patients and by patients’ relatives. But it was the patients rather than relatives who tended to act aggressively. Some 31 percent of the nurses interviewed said aggression had a determining impact on their work while 57 percent said it had a partial influence. Only 12 percent said it had no influence on their work.

Attila Vorosmarty, who led the survey, said that although the rights afforded to public servants in uniform, such as the police, applied to health-care workers under the law, the uniform of a nurse did not have such a restraining effect. He said more efforts were needed to fight violence against nurses.

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Source: http://mtva.hu/hu/hungary-matters