Ways to Deal With Unacceptable Patient Behavior

Tragically, healthcare professionals often face unacceptable patient behaviors during their careers – from verbal abuse and threats to intimidation, bad behavior, or sexual harassment. Healthcare workers can better protect themselves, diffuse situations, and work in more secure work environments if they know how to respond appropriately when encountering this sort of behavior. The best nursing colleges in Illinois facilitate students with a deeper understanding of the same.

What Types of Behavior Are Unacceptable?

All forms of patient behavior that create threats or make people feel unsafe are unacceptable, and healthcare providers tend to experience them the most frequently.

• Verbal threats
• Physical intimidation
• Racist remarks
• Comments that are sexist
• rudeness
• Sarcasm
• Sexual Touch
• Comments and suggestions
• Racism/misogyny

Unacceptable patient behaviors come in all shapes and forms. While rude, threatening, or disrespectful actions should never be accepted, trying to understand why patients act this way might help manage situations correctly; you might consider possible causes as you handle each case correctly – seeing things from their point of view might make diffusing anger easier than expected!

Patients and families may become frustrated if they must wait a lengthy amount of time before receiving care or feel like their concerns aren’t being heard by healthcare providers. You should make time for them and their concerns, offering your sincerest apologies or providing proof that their issues have been heard by listening carefully to what they have to say.

When there is no evident cause for unacceptable patient behavior, hospital security or practice management must be contacted as quickly as possible to address it. Aggressive, disruptive, or aggressive actions cannot be allowed as this puts patients’ and staff’s safety at risk.

Handling Racism and Bigotry

Hospital environments tend to be extremely diverse environments, as both staff members and patients often come from various cultural or heritage backgrounds. Patients may request treatment by another doctor of different culture or heritage, make discriminatory or offensive comments toward this doctor or ask to see another.

The American Medical Association recommends that derogatory patients should be moved to another provider and should be treated with dignity; they are, however, prohibited from expressing racist or bigoted viewpoints.

Respect is of utmost importance at hospitals and treatment centers, both to their staff as well as patients. One way of communicating this message to everyone involved would be posting signs throughout your hospital or treatment center that indicate aggressive, violent behavior or other inappropriate conduct is not tolerated, while all members must treat others with the utmost respect at all times. Students when pursuing nursing degrees in Illinois learn about disrespectful behavior and violence in healthcare settings and how to tackle it as medical professionals.

Prepare Your Team

Your team must learn to manage difficult situations and understand disruptive behavior effectively in order to provide every member with the tools to care for difficult patients in a professional way.

Team members need to understand when and where panic buttons and personal alarms should be utilized for maximum protection on the job site. Panic buttons for healthcare workers allow healthcare personnel to quickly summon assistance if threatened or attacked by patients; knowing when and where panic buttons can be deployed makes team members feel safer at work.

Read More:- 5 Factors to Improve Hospital Patient Safety

How to Treat Patients Properly?

Establish Physical Boundaries

Setting physical boundaries may prove useful if a patient touches inappropriately or makes verbal threats against staff, suggesting such comments is unacceptable behavior. Doctors and nurses should make it clear to patients that physical contact or any common type of violence would be forbidden, as is any inappropriate behavior exhibited towards staff; in such instances, security or another co-worker must be called for support if that behavior persists.

Include Your Co-Workers

Patients don’t always respond well to verbal instructions. In particular, mental illnesses or substance use may result in them disregarding warnings made verbally. When patients fail to listen or follow directions verbally, they often become difficult for caregivers and can even disregard warnings verbally issued against them. So make sure your team includes co-workers in every discussion!

Have a Planned Reply

Healthcare professionals must always have an emergency plan ready when encountering patients who act inappropriately, such as incidents of violence against healthcare workers. All responses should be professional, clear, and unambiguous so as to leave no room for misinterpretation or confusion.

Be Firm When Responding To Unacceptable Patient Behaviors

It’s crucial that nurses respond firmly. After giving a warning and failing to see change despite several warnings, you should contact security and inform them that this patient may require transferal. Nurses should keep this in mind in every kind of facility whether it’s a hospital or a LPN nursing home job.

Documenting Patient Behavior

Any time an unacceptable behavior from a patient occurs, its documentation should be completed for use as training resources and criminal charges may follow. These records could then serve both purposes simultaneously.

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Dismissal Procedure

It may become necessary to dismiss or transfer patients if they continue to behave inappropriately despite warnings, so when that time comes, you should remain as calm and clear with them as possible when explaining why this must occur.

Exposure to unacceptable behavior may result in stress, anxiety, and burnout among doctors and nurses. By understanding how to combat unacceptable conduct effectively, teamwork will improve as staff turnover decreases and staff retention increases.