One in three caregivers experienced aggression at work during corona. This is evident from figures from IDEWE, the service for prevention and protection at work.
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Covid-19 has certainly not softened those mores, according to recent figures for the corona years 2020 and 2021 from IDEWE, which were extracted from still raw data at the request of De Standaard. 17 percent or nearly one in five of 60,000 respondents in a contact profession said they had experienced aggression from outsiders in the workplace during the six months prior to the survey. Younger employees and women in particular often have a hard time.
In these already alarming figures, the healthcare sector takes the cake. “More than one in three (34.4 percent) employees there say they have experienced external aggression,” says Lode Godderis, CEO of IDEWE, professor of occupational medicine at KU Leuven and member of the corona advisory council Gems. “The problems are not new, the pandemic has brought them to a head. Aggression is a basic reaction of every person and of all times, but is more common in crisis situations. The pandemic is stressful for both healthcare providers and patients or visitors.’
Covid-19 has changed the nature of the incidents. ‘What we call frustration aggression in particular has worsened,’ says Stijn Van Daele, safety manager at UZ Gent. “Those collisions are getting worse.”
According to various stakeholders in the sector, the figures are an underestimate. ‘Many nurses or doctors do not or no longer report incidents,’ Van Daele suspects. The fact that care providers do not report incidents or report too little is partly due to a lack of time, but sometimes also to habituation.
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