“Is it safe for a nurse to be going into multiple peoples’ homes alone?” This question often arises in my clinical group. One would think that this question is asked often not only by visiting nurses but also the organizations sending these nurses out into their communities. Using multiple search engines such as CINAHL, Nursing and Allied Health, and Health Source: Nursing/Academic Edition I found very little on the topic of safety of visiting nurses. It appears that this question is not asked nearly as much as I had anticipated. It was a struggle to find three articles on the topic, but it was nearly impossible to find recent articles on the topic. When I found that there were no other articles that were more recent, I decided to settle on
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According to Mathiews (2014), home healthcare agencies need to focus on improving safety practices because visiting nursing was ranked the second most dangerous occupation in the United States in 2009. Mathiews (2014) conducted an extensive literature review about home-care nurses and found that there was no device in place “to collect data on safety issues specific to home visiting.” If there is no way of collecting this data, what will stop it from occurring in the future? The topic of violence in the visiting nurses workplace needs to be addressed so that safety measures can be put into place. These nurses are helping keep communities healthy while putting their own health on the line, they should not also have to deal with …show more content…
According to McPhaul (2005), there were no workplace violence prevention strategies in place for visiting health care workers in 2005. McPhaul (2005) recognized that future studies need to be done in this topic because so few existed when she wrote her dissertation. My findings show that ten years later, in 2015, there is still very little research on the topic. The last article I was able to find on this topic also acknowledged that visiting nursing is “unpredictable, uncontrollable, and uncertain” (Billay, 2001). Despite this article being written in 2001, I learned from it that Alberta, Canada has had measures in place to protect those who work alone since 2001. These measures include writing a hazard assessment and taking measures to reduce or eliminate the hazards (Billay, 2001). It seems that the United Sates could learn from this system that Alberta has in place and attempt to achieve something similar. Any steps taken to improve the situation for visiting nurses will be better than doing nothing. More research needs to be done and safety practices need to be put in place for visiting nurses. It is not acceptable that the people keeping the community healthy must face extra hazards on top of increased exposure to
According to Mathiews (2014), home healthcare agencies need to focus on improving safety practices because visiting nursing was ranked the second most dangerous occupation in the United States in 2009. Mathiews (2014) conducted an extensive literature review about home-care nurses and found that there was no device in place “to collect data on safety issues specific to home visiting.” If there is no way of collecting this data, what will stop it from occurring in the future? The topic of violence in the visiting nurses workplace needs to be addressed so that safety measures can be put into place. These nurses are helping keep communities healthy while putting their own health on the line, they should not also have to deal with …show more content…
According to McPhaul (2005), there were no workplace violence prevention strategies in place for visiting health care workers in 2005. McPhaul (2005) recognized that future studies need to be done in this topic because so few existed when she wrote her dissertation. My findings show that ten years later, in 2015, there is still very little research on the topic. The last article I was able to find on this topic also acknowledged that visiting nursing is “unpredictable, uncontrollable, and uncertain” (Billay, 2001). Despite this article being written in 2001, I learned from it that Alberta, Canada has had measures in place to protect those who work alone since 2001. These measures include writing a hazard assessment and taking measures to reduce or eliminate the hazards (Billay, 2001). It seems that the United Sates could learn from this system that Alberta has in place and attempt to achieve something similar. Any steps taken to improve the situation for visiting nurses will be better than doing nothing. More research needs to be done and safety practices need to be put in place for visiting nurses. It is not acceptable that the people keeping the community healthy must face extra hazards on top of increased exposure to