Violence risk assessment: combining actuarial and clinical information to structure clinical judgements for the formulation and management of risk

Risk management by early recognition of warning signs in patients in forensic psychiatric care

PURPOSE

To clarify the concept of early recognition for the field of forensic nursing. The concept is based on the proposition that patient behavior deteriorating toward aggression is idiosyncratic but nevertheless reconstructable like a "signature." Once reconstructed, this signature can be used to detect "early signs" of deterioration and thus prevent violent behavior.

CONCEPT

Early recognition is approached from the perspective of deteriorating behavior. Special attention is paid to the social and interpersonal factors related to the individual behaving violently. From this perspective, the thoughts, feelings, and behavior of the patient can indicate the onset of aggression, and early recognition of these warning signs can help thwart such deterioration. The aviation metaphor of a "black box" is used to emphasize the importance of attention to early warning signs. Patients in forensic care must draw upon their previous experiences (i.e., their own black boxes) to gain insight into their violent behavior and the warning signals for this. The emphasis is on the cooperation between the patient and the nurse in the application of risk management strategies. The Early Recognition Method provides an approach in which patients and nurses also gradually attune their perspectives on aggressive behavior.

CONCLUSION

The concept of early recognition is important because it extends the idea of early intervention to include enabling patients to control their own behavior. Early recognition has strong practical implications for forensic nurses as it allows them to attenuate aggression by assisting patients with the detection of early warning signs.

Risk prediction: a review of the literature

This review of risk assessment and prediction literature briefly describes the historical and philosophical influences on the construct of dangerousness; chronicles the advances in research associated with the reconceptualization of dangerousness as risk; and describes current practice and research related to risk assessment, with particular attention to commonly used risk assessment tools and to existing issues and controversies. This cannot be considered a systematic review of the literature but a reflection of some of the key issues found in the literature.

Violence and aggression: a literature review

This paper reports the results of a literature review that was undertaken to provide background for a small pilot study that introduced violence measurement instruments that was to assist the development of nursing practice on an acute psychiatric unit. Multiple databases were searched, focusing on publications since 1994: CINAHL, Ovid Healthstar, Ovid MEDLINE (R), EMBASE, and PsycINFO. The search used the following four groups of key word alternatives (used in truncated form to allow for ending permutations) in combination with each other: violence, aggression, dangerous; prediction, assessment, factor, risk, issue, cause, reason; mental, psychiatric; inpatient, short-term, acute, admission. Searching was supplemented with footnote chasing of those papers retrieved and existing resources of the first author. Consequently, the synthesis of the results discussed cannot be considered a systematic review of the literature and is a reflection of some of the key issues found in the literature.

STAMP: components of observable behaviour that indicate potential for patient violence in emergency departments

AIM

This paper is the report of a study to explicate the components of observable behaviour that indicate a potential for violence in patients, their family and friends when presenting at an emergency department.

BACKGROUND

Violence towards nurses is a contemporary, multifaceted problem for the healthcare workforce globally. International literature identifies emergency departments as having high levels of violence.

METHOD

A mixed method case study design was adopted, and data were collected by means of 290 hours of participant observation, 16 semi-structured interviews and 13 informal field interviews over a 5-month period in 2005. Thematic analysis of textual data was undertaken using NVivo2. Frequency counts were developed from the numerical data.

FINDINGS

Five distinctive elements of observable behaviour indicating potential for violence in patients, their families and friends were identified. These elements can be conceptualized as a potential nursing violence assessment framework and described through the acronym STAMP: Staring and eye contact, Tone and volume of voice, Anxiety, Mumbling and Pacing.

CONCLUSION

Staring and eye contact, Tone and volume of voice, Anxiety, Mumbling and Pacing provides a useful, practical nursing violence assessment framework to assist nurses to quickly identify patients, families and friends who have a potential for violence.

Predicting inpatient violence using an extended version of the Brøset-Violence-Checklist: instrument development and clinical application

BACKGROUND

Patient aggression is a common problem in acute psychiatric wards and calls for preventive measures. The timely use of preventive measures presupposes a preceded risk assessment. The Norwegian Brøset-Violence-Checklist (BVC) is one of the few instruments suited for short-time prediction of violence of psychiatric inpatients in routine care. Aims of our study were to improve the accuracy of the short-term prediction of violence in acute inpatient settings by combining the Brøset-Violence-Checklist (BVC) with an overall subjective clinical risk-assessment and to test the application of the combined measure in daily practice.

METHOD

We conducted a prospective cohort study with two samples of newly admitted psychiatric patients for instrument development (219 patients) and clinical application (300 patients). Risk of physical attacks was assessed by combining the 6-item BVC and a 6-point score derived from a Visual Analog Scale. Incidents were registered with the Staff Observation of Aggression Scale-Revised SOAS-R. Test accuracy was described as the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUCROC).

RESULTS

The AUCROC of the new VAS-complemented BVC-version (BVC-VAS) was 0.95 in and 0.89 in the derivation and validation study respectively.

CONCLUSION

The BVC-VAS is an easy to use and accurate instrument for systematic short-term prediction of violent attacks in acute psychiatric wards. The inclusion of the VAS-derived data did not change the accuracy of the original BVC.

Evaluating the validity of anger regulation problems, interpersonal style, and disturbed mental state for predicting inpatient violence

Research has been conducted to try to identify risk factors to help predict which patients will be violent during psychiatric hospitalization. Despite the relatively large amount of research conducted, it is difficult to draw any firm conclusions, as the studies vary considerably in study design, methods used, and choice of outcome measures. Studies also tend to focus on risk prediction, even though risk management is the primary aim of clinical practice in mental health services and few studies have focused on a theoretical basis for understanding violence. This study assessed the predictive validity of brief assessment scales in a sample of 94 forensic inpatients who had been inpatient for a median of 521 days, to test the hypotheses that anger regulation problems, interpersonal style, and disturbed mental state would be linked to increased violence risk in a forensic hospital during a hospital stay. The outcome variables for this study were physical violence against another and/or clear threats of physical violence. The results of this study provide support for the hypotheses, and this remained the case after controlling for age, gender, length of stay, and presence of major mental disorder. The findings should not only assist clinicians with assessment and management of risk but also support the reconceptualizing of risk prediction research to reflect the task of clinical risk management.

Risk: a concept analysis

TOPIC

Concept analysis of risk.

PURPOSE

To analyze the concept risk and provide a new definition of risk.

SOURCES

Published literature.

CONCLUSIONS

A new definition of risk that emerged from this concept analysis can provide clarity and direction for future research. Nurse researchers can look to this definition to expand what is known about health-seeking behaviors as opposed to "risk" behaviors and seek to further our understanding of the cognitive and experiential process of risk identification.

Pre-admission nursing assessment in a Welsh Medium Secure Unit (1991-2000): Part 2--comparison of traditional nursing assessment with the HCR-20 risk assessment tool

Pre-admission forensic nursing assessment is a tradition that has no research evidence base, little documentary support and is an expensive drain on nursing resources from clinical environments. Such an expensive practice warrants some evaluation of the quality of these nursing assessments. This study assessed the quality of nursing risk assessments through comparison with the HCR-20, a well-established and widely validated violence risk assessment instrument. There was a high degree of correspondence between nurse assessments and the contents of the HCR-20. The results offer support for forensic nurses' abilities to develop effective measures and practices based upon nursing knowledge and experience where no formal evidence base previously existed.