UNC School Of Nursing awarded $25,000 for workplace violence training project

The AARP Health Equity and Nursing Innovation Fund awarded a $25,000 grant to the UNC School of Nursing, UNC Medical Center and UNC Health Rex for their project “Promoting Healthy Work Environments and Confronting Workplace Violence Through Simulation Training.”

The project provides workplace violence training through simulations to let nurses and senior nursing students practice conflict scenarios in a safer environment. 

With their fund, AARP said they seek to “stimulate solutions to strengthen and diversify the nursing workforce through innovative nurse recruitment and retention strategies that establish and sustain healthy, equitable work environments.”

The Tar Heel Academic Practice Partnership is the organization that applied for the grant. Last year, the Dean of Carolina Nursing Valerie Howard said she worked with the Chief Nursing Officers of UNC Medical Center and UNC Health Rex to create TAPP to formalize the partnership between the three entities and create continuity between academic and practical settings.

Howard said North Carolina is dealing with one of the worst nursing shortages across the nation, saying that workplace culture and violence contribute to the issue.

“We can create all the nurses we want in North Carolina, but if we can't retain them because of the workplace culture, then we're not addressing the needs of the nursing shortage,” she said.

Howard said she has been a nurse for 36 years. Lorie Rhine, Chief Nursing Officer at UNC Health Rex, has been in healthcare for over 40 years, and Margaret Nelson, a senior nursing student, has started her career as a Nursing Assistant at the UNC Medical Center. 

The common denominator between the three isn’t just their profession; they’ve all experienced workplace violence as members of the nursing team.

Rhine said she had her front two teeth knocked out by a confused patient at a nursing home, Howard said she was kicked and has experienced other forms of physical and verbal abuse while working at a trauma unit and Nelson said she had also been exposed to verbal and physical altercations whilst working at a psychotic disorder treatment unit.

“Everyone should feel safe when they come to work and not be worrying about violence,” Nelson said.

Rhine said the highest incidences of workplace violence at UNC Health Rex occur in the emergency department, the Alzheimer’s, dementia or geriatric care units, and the psychiatric and behavioral units.

Both nursing students and UNC Health Nurses get workplace trainings through PowerPoint modules, Howard said. Nelson said she believes that the proposed simulations would be more detailed in replicating not only patient-nurse violence but also other conflict-prone scenarios, such as relative-nurse violence and violence from within the healthcare team.

“I think [the simulations] would make staff, nurses and nursing students more prepared for whatever situation comes up,” she said. “Because [workplace violence] can really happen anywhere. So it'd just be good to be better prepared.”

Howard said she wants to ensure that future nurses are not being turned away from the profession.

“We're really working on the environment in which our healthcare workers work because we don't want them just to survive,” Howard said. “We want them to thrive.”

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