Comparing Your Hospital to the 2015 Crime Survey
For comparison purposes, it might be beneficial to compare your hospital’s crime rates to those presented above. The formula to calculate the crime rate per 100 beds is:
Crime Rate = (x / Beds) * 100
where x is the total crime for each crime type and
Beds is the number of beds at your hospital
Example: (17 assaults / 360 beds) = 0.047 * 100 = 4.7 assaults per bed
As mentioned earlier in this report, the use of crime rates provides context and allow for comparisons to other hospitals. Bed counts were used based on experience from prior crime surveys where additional size and population indicators were collected. That experience informed the decision to use bed counts as other indicators were more challenging to obtain and not consistently reported via the crime surveys.
Workplace Violence Typology
For Aggravated Assaults and Assaults, participants were asked to drill down further, if possible, into the FBI’s workplace violence typology:
- Workplace Violence Type 1: Violent acts by criminals, who have no other connection with the workplace, but enter to commit robbery or another crime.
- Workplace Violence Type 2: Violence directed at employees by customers, clients, patients, students, inmates, or any others for whom an organization provides services.
Examples: patient-on-staff; visitor-on-staff - Workplace Violence Type 3: Violence against coworkers, supervisors, or managers by a present or former employee.
Examples: physician-on-nurse; employee-on-employee - Workplace Violence Type 4: Violence committed in the workplace by someone who doesn’t work there, but has a personal relationship with an employee—an abusive spouse or domestic partner.
Most of the U.S. respondents were able to provide the drill down for aggravated assaults and assaults for each year, 2012, 2013, and 2014. This indicates that a significant number of hospitals are collecting detailed crime information allowing for such analysis internally. We applaud these hospital security professionals. As seen in the graph below, Type 2 Aggravated Assaults accounted for 79% of all aggravated assaults and 90% of all assaults in the U.S.
Aggravated Assault and Assaults in the Emergency Department
As mentioned in the Introduction, hospital security professionals know through experience that Emergency Departments typically generate the greatest number of assaults and workplace violence incidents in the hospital. For the 2015 Crime Survey, we were able to quantify that knowledge by adding three new questions that inquired about assaults and aggravated assaults in the Emergency Department. Specifically, we collected data regarding the number of Aggravated Assaults and Assaults in the Emergency Departments and compared those numbers with the rest of the hospital.
In U.S. hospitals, 44% of aggravated assaults and 46% of assaults occurred in Emergency Departments in 2014 as compared to the rest of the hospital spaces.[1] The rate of aggravated assault was 11.9 per 100 Emergency Department beds. The rate of assault was 42.0 per 100 Emergency Department beds.
As seen in the graph below, a disproportionate number of aggravated assaults and assaults occur in Emergency Departments relative to the entire hospital.
[1] Aggravated assault and assault rates were calculated using only bed counts in the Emergency Department, not total licensed hospital beds.