The training provided to Irish healthcare staff to help them deal with violent incidents in the workplace is "unregulated and inconsistent" and much of it is not evidence-based, a nurses conference heard yesterday.
Kevin McKenna, a project officer with the Health Service Executive in the northeast, told the annual Siptu nursing convention in Sligo that "it would disturb people to know" that staff are being trained in techniques which those staff "would never in my belief be legally permitted" to use.
Work-related violence was so frequent in the health sector it was "a bit like the common cold", he added, but nobody had ever costed it in terms of the time staff had to take off work to recover from such incidents or in terms of staff taking early retirement as a result of it.
"Nobody has ever made an attempt to say how much did this cost us, which is remarkable . . . if we knew how much it cost there would be people absolutely dancing up and down," he said.
He believes it is costing the health service millions every year.
He said if we started now to replace nurses who had retired prematurely as a result of work-related violence, it would be 2013 before they would be fully replaced and the cost incurred would be many millions.
The first large-scale study of work-related violence published in 2004 showed violence in the workplace was a fact of life for those working in the health sector, he said.
"Some groups had very high incidence of threats, for instance a community welfare officer is three times more likely to be abused than a nurse is, he or she is probably 1½ times more likely to be threatened, but a nurse is six times more likely to be assaulted than a community welfare officer."
Mr McKenna said training needed to be provided to staff to help them deal with work-related violence. The 2004 study found 75 per cent of nurses rated training as essential but only about 27 per cent of them were getting it.