Nursing students do not expect to be stabbed or punched on the job, but research shows more than a third experience physical violence during clinical placements.
About 60 per cent of students also reported experiencing abuse from patients, patients’ relatives and other healthcare workers.
Murdoch University PhD student Martin Hopkins conducted a survey of 150 students undertaking clinical placements in Perth hospitals.
The former emergency department nurse and nursing lecturer said due to a shortage of nurses on the wards, many students were carrying out frontline care.
“We had reports of kicking, punching, biting from people, we even had one student say that someone tried to stab them,” he said.
“These students are in life threatening situations that we weren’t aware of.”
Mr Hopkins said many students said they would reconsider nursing as a career as a result of their experiences of violence during clinical placements.
“There was certainly a substantial amount of students that felt it was threatening their career and that they considered a career change,” he said.
“Some of them felt incompetent, they wanted to discontinue their nursing, they were unsure if they wanted to care for patients, they were shocked by what had happened and they felt they could never be a competent registered nurse.”
Australian Nursing Federation state secretary Mark Olson said the union encourages student nurses to report any aggressive behaviour they encounter while on clinical placement.
“Nobody comes to work to be punched, kicked, bitten or spat at, so why do nurses have to put up with it?” he said.
“Unfortunately, I have to say that the Treasury’s latest savings measures to remove senior staff from the frontline is not a step in the right direction and has the potential to make hospitals a more dangerous place to work.
“And we will continue to call on the government to add nursing to the list of professions protected by mandatory sentencing legislation until these statistics improve.”
Mr Hopkins said while registered nurses were offered training in dealing with violence, it was now clear undergraduates needed such training before on-the-job training.
“We need to be proactive in this and give the students the ability to deal with it,” he said.
“We know it’s going to happen, there’s not a lot we can do about that, it’s very difficult to prevent aggressive situations but what we can do is forewarn and forearm our students.”