Management of Violence and Aggression in Emergency Environment; a Narrative Review of 200 Related Articles

Adv J Emerg Med. 2018 Nov 29;3(1):e7. doi: 10.22114/AJEM.v0i0.117. eCollection 2019 Winter.

Abstract

Context: The aim of this study is to reviewing various approaches for dealing with agitated patients in emergency department (ED) including of chemical and physical restraint methods.

Evidence acquisition: This review was conducted by searching "Violence," "Aggression," and "workplace violence" keywords in these databases: PubMed, Scopus, EmBase, ScienceDirect, Cochrane Database, and Google Scholar. In addition to using keywords for finding the papers, the related article capability was used to find more papers. From the found papers, published papers from 2005 to 2018 were chosen to enter the paper pool for further review.

Results: Ultimately, 200 papers were used in this paper to conduct a comprehensive review regarding violence management in ED. The results were categorized as prevention, verbal methods, pharmacological interventions and physical restraint.

Conclusion: In this study various methods of chemical and physical restraint methods were reviewed so an emergency medicine physician be aware of various available choices in different clinical situations for agitated patients.

Keywords: Aggression; Emergency Service; Hospital; Physical; Restraint; Violence.

Publication types

  • Review