Workplace violence towards emergency medical services staff in Gauteng

Abstract

Paramedics are a crucial component of South African public health, medical and emergency services systems. While some interventions have been tried, it seems that violence against paramedics just keeps getting worse. In recent years, there have been an increasing number of newspaper reports suggesting that the rate of violent incidents against emergency medical services personnel in South Africa may be accelerating. With these acts of hostility and violence growing, job satisfaction amongst paramedics will invariably decline and further push them to consider leaving the profession. The aim of this study was to investigate workplace violence among paramedics during emergency call outs in Gauteng, South Africa. The study used a mixed-method approach, gathering data from paramedics through surveys and interviews. Semi-structured interviews and a questionnaire were used to gather the data. For the quantitative data, thematic analysis was used, and for the qualitative data, descriptive statistics. The results indicated that the number of women who took up the profession as paramedics was lower than that of men. The quantitative data revealed that workplace violence the emergency medical services was largely reported during on emergency assignments. Workplace violence exists and most of the employees have experienced it at some point while on duty. Verbal abuse was the most frequent kind of workplace violence, followed by physical violence, while sexual abuse was the least frequent. Very little has been done to safeguard emergency medical services employees from workplace violence and reporting the violence is met with a number of limitations. The study also found that the majority of emergency medical services workers did not know where or were not sure how to report workplace violence. In light of the above results, the study recommended a collaborative effort between regional and South African health organisations in providing site-specific education and policies. In addition, awareness programmes should focus on empowering victims to report workplace violence, as well as strategies to handle cases of workplace violence.