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Many health care workers fear they’ll be injured, survey shows

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Photo: DragonImages/iStockphoto

Bannockburn, IL — Around 1 out of 4 health care workers don’t feel safe on the job, according to the results of a recent survey.

For its 2023 Healthcare Workplace Safety Trend Report, medical waste management company Stericycle, in partnership with The Logit Group, conducted a survey and interviewed 400 health care practitioners and 100 administrators.

Results also show that 63% of the respondents worry they’ll be injured by patients refusing recommended care, behaving poorly or becoming combative. Additionally, negative feelings such as stress, burnout and exhaustion were reported more frequently by health care workers in emergency medicine and psychiatry.

Nearly all the respondents (98%) said inadequate staffing was “very” or “somewhat” influential to their feelings of safety in the workplace.

According to the report, 100,000 registered nurses have left the profession in the past two years and another 610,000 plan to leave by 2027.

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