Quitting one’s job or leaving one’s profession: unexplored consequences of workplace violence and discrimination against health professionals

BACKGROUND: Although workplace violence and discrimination against healthcare workers are global and universal phenomena, and violence at work is recognized as a serious and growing problem, in Switzerland, hardly anything is known about the related consequences on job changes and career endings, which are two major staffing challenges present in the notoriously understaffed healthcare sector. METHOD: Data collected from a written survey conducted among 1,840 hospital employees, of which 1,441 were health professionals, were used to evaluate and estimate the prevalence and impact of specific and cumulated forms of workplace violence and discrimination on the work climate and particularly on subsequent turnover intentions and career endings. Established multi- and single-item measures were used as predicting, intervening and outcome variables. Relative frequencies stratified for nurses, physicians and therapists were calculated to estimate and differentiate the size of the phenomena under study. Furthermore, crosstabulations, as well as multivariate regression analyses, were performed to explore the associations of interest. RESULTS: Every fifth to sixth nurse and every seventh to eighth physician reported having had intentions to change jobs or leave the profession within the past year. These intentions become much more prevalent across all health professions when one or even two or more different forms of violence and/or discrimination at work are experienced and reported. Accordingly, the relative risks for intending to quit one’s job or leave one’s profession increase significantly and steadily with a growing number (1, 2 +) of different experienced forms of violence and/or discrimination at work compared to the reference group of those who are nonaffected (aOR from 2.5 up to 5.4). This fairly strong association was only slightly reduced (aOR from 2.1 to 4.0) when work climate was additionally taken into account as a potential intervening variable. Although work climate only partly accounted for the association under study, a poor work climate was an additional strong predictor and independent risk factor for intentions to turnover (aOR = 6.4) or leave the profession (aOR = 4.2). CONCLUSIONS: Experiences of workplace violence and discrimination and the resulting poor work climate both together and independent of each other seem to be important causes of job changes and career endings among healthcare workers in Switzerland.