“ABC Senior Care Home” has 50 employees and according to WorkSafeBC, 25% of the
organization’s workplace injuries in 2014 and 2015 were due to acts of violence or aggression from residents. In the long-term care sector, acts of violence or aggression account for 11% of all injuries reported to WorkSafeBC. ABC Senior Care Home is above the provincial average for injuries related to these types of incidents.
A coloured dot system to identify residents who are potentially aggressive or violent exists at ABC, however an audit revealed that staff were updating the dots only after a staff member had been injured as a result of aggression or violence, not when they had observed change in behaviour. 65% of the nursing staff had undergone point-of-care risk assessments training in 2012, however this left some shifts without any staff trained to assess residents at point-of- care. This created a larger volume of point-of-care assessments to be done on shifts with trained staff.
The last violence prevention training for all staff was in 2012 and since then a large number of trained staff retired and replaced with staff who have not had recent violence prevention training. Hires since 2012 were provided ABC’s policies and procedures on workplace violence in written form at point of hire.
Policies and procedures for point-of-care risk assessments and updating the coloured dot system exist but are often not used and mostly followed only when an incident is reported
