BUSI 344 Week 2 Discussion Board Forum 2 Example

Discussion Board Forum 2: Human Resources, the Law and Workplace Violence

BUSI 344 Human Resource Management in Healthcare Administration, Discussion Board Forum 2

Thread by [Student Name]

The hospital, its incidents and the classmates are composites; the textbook, Scripture and the peer-reviewed articles cited are real.

At our 220-bed hospital, reported assaults on staff doubled in two years, from 31 to 64, and many more verbal threats went unreported. Until last year, human resources handled each report as an individual employee relations matter: an injured nurse filed for workers' compensation, a manager wrote an incident report and nothing changed. This week's chapter showed why that approach falls short. Niles (2013) explains that health care employers operate within a body of law that shapes every human resource decision, including the obligation to keep employees safe. Federal workplace safety law requires employers to provide a workplace free from recognized serious hazards, and violence from patients and visitors is now a well-recognized hazard in health care.

The scale of the problem is large. Wang et al. (2025) pooled 45 studies and estimated that 67% of nurses experience verbal abuse, most often from patients' relatives and friends and, troublingly, from physicians as well. Physical assaults are less common but more harmful, and both drive burnout, sick leave and turnover. For human resources, every unaddressed incident is also a recruiting problem, because nurses talk about which hospitals keep them safe.

Prevention can work. Kim et al. (2026) studied 7,625 patients on four nonpsychiatric inpatient units and found that screening every patient with a brief aggression risk tool, flagging high-risk patients and adding proactive rounding by a behavioral health nurse reduced violent events from 5.30% to 3.71% of patients, with a significant drop in physical assaults.

Our human resources plan now has four parts: a screening tool adopted with nursing leadership, a simple reporting system that staff can use in two minutes, de-escalation training for every new hire and a support process after any incident, including paid time off and counseling. We review incident data monthly with the safety committee and report trends to the board each quarter, so the problem stays visible to leaders who control the budget. The psalmist calls God a refuge and a fortress (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016, Psalm 91:2), and those who lead organizations reflect that care when they make the workplace a place of refuge rather than danger. Keeping staff safe is not an employee perk; it is the first promise an employer makes.

Reply to Kendra

Kendra, you wrote that the abuse nurses on your unit fear most comes not from patients but from one physician who shouts at them. That matches the research: Wang et al. (2025) found physicians among the leading perpetrators of verbal abuse against nurses. Niles (2013) notes that human resource policies on conduct must apply to everyone in the organization, which includes physicians with privileges, even when they are not employees. Lainidi et al. (2023), reviewing 76 studies, found that whether staff speak up depends heavily on organizational culture, so a policy is only as strong as leaders' willingness to enforce it. Ephesians urges believers to let no corrupting talk come out of their mouths, but only words that build up (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016, Ephesians 4:29). A clear process matters: nurses need to know where to report, that reports will be investigated by someone with authority and that they will not face retaliation for speaking up. Has your hospital's medical staff office been involved, since physician conduct often falls under its bylaws rather than ordinary human resource policy?

Reply to Andre

Andre, you asked what a hospital should do after an assault, beyond filing a report. Sammut et al. (2025) reviewed 27 studies of post-incident strategies and found three types: support for staff through debriefs and psychological help, plans and accountability for aggressors and system-level responses such as investigations and feedback. They noted that the evidence for these strategies is still thin and that success is too often measured only as fewer incidents, not as staff feeling safe. Kim et al. (2026) showed that prevention reduces incidents, so post-incident support should feed lessons back into screening. Niles (2013) places employee well-being within human resource responsibilities, which supports making these steps routine. Paul urged believers to bear one another's burdens (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016, Galatians 6:2). In practice, that could mean a standard checklist after every incident: immediate medical care, a debrief within a day, an offer of counseling, paid recovery time and a follow-up conversation a week later. Does your hospital follow up with injured staff a week later, not just on the day of the incident?

References

English Standard Version Bible. (2016). Crossway. (Original work published 2001)

Kim, S. C., Vejnovich, C., Hall, L., & Hultman, S. (2026). Workplace violence prevention program targeting patients at risk of violence in nonpsychiatric inpatient units: A prospective interventional study. Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcjq.2026.08.010

Lainidi, O., Jendeby, M. K., Montgomery, A., Mouratidis, C., Paitaridou, K., Cook, C., Johnson, J., & Karakasidou, E. (2023). An integrative systematic review of employee silence and voice in healthcare: What are we really measuring? Frontiers in Psychiatry, 14, 1111579. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2023.1111579

Niles, N. J. (2013). Basic concepts of health care human resource management. Jones & Bartlett Learning.

Sammut, D., Hallett, N., & Lees-Deutsch, L. (2025). Post-event strategies for workplace violence affecting hospital staff: A scoping review. Journal of Advanced Nursing. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1111/jan.70460

Wang, Q., Yang, Y. P., Li, Z. Y., Yu, F. Y., He, Y., Zhang, M., Luo, C., Tung, T. H., & Chen, H. X. (2025). Prevalence and associated factor of verbal abuse against nurses: A systematic review. International Nursing Review, 72(1), e13095. https://doi.org/10.1111/inr.13095