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Sexual harassment of staff by patients in mental health units

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Maria B. Tomé de la Granja*
Affiliation:
Maudsley Hospital, Denmark Hill, London SE5 8AZ
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The Health and Safety Executive (1992) defines violence against staff as “any incident in which an employee is threatened or assaulted by a member of the public in circumstances arising out of the course of his or her employment”. Verbal abuse and threats are, as the Health and Safety Executive notes, the most common types of incidents, and staff have the common-law right to be protected from such incidents in the course of their work. While the literature on physical violence against mental health professionals is quite large and expanding (see, for example, Health and Safety Commission, 1987; Shepherd, 1994; Wykes, 1994), comparatively little emphasis has been placed on verbal assaults, although these may be extremely distressing.

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Briefings
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1994

References

Health and Safety Commission. Health Advisory Service (1987) Violence to Staff in the Health Services. ISBN 0118839179. HMSO.Google Scholar
Health and Safety Executive (1992) Violence to Staff. Google Scholar
Shepherd, J. (1994) Violence in Health Care: a practical guide to coping with violence and caring for victims. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Wykes, T. (1994) Violence and Health Care Professionals. Chapman and Hall.Google Scholar
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