Comprehensive violence safety checklist for Psychiatric Outpatient Clinic

Abstract

Background: The prevalence of violence in psychiatric outpatient services is on the rise, posing risks to the well-being and safety of medical personnel. This includes physical and verbal aggression, resulting in injuries, disabilities, deaths, and increased anxiety levels.

Objectives: This study aimed to address the need for violence prevention and response in outpatient psychiatric services by developing a comprehensive safety checklist.

Methods: A qualitative study was conducted, incorporating in-depth interviews with 12 medical personnel and a literature review. The findings were utilized to develop the comprehensive safety checklist, which underwent revision and validation by five mental health experts to ensure its construct validity. Subsequently, 50 mental healthcare professionals evaluated their services using the checklist, and the collected data were analyzed to assess the checklist’s quality.

Results: The comprehensive violence safety checklist comprises 40 rating-scale items. The scale demonstrated excellent content validity, with a score of 0.98. The internal consistency of the checklist was high, indicated by a Cronbach’s Alpha value of 0.88. All items exhibited a Corrected Item-total Correlation greater than 0.2. Furthermore, 65.0% (26/40) of the items significantly discriminated between the 25th and 75th percentile groups.

Conclusion: The developed comprehensive safety checklist serves as a valuable tool for evaluating the level of security for violence within psychiatric out-patient services. Its exceptional quality, high internal consistency, and satisfactory discriminative power make it an effective instrument for enhancing safety in psychiatric settings.