Title: You wash it off and then you go and do your job”

- A qualitative analysis about trauma nurses victimization of workplace violence

The aim of this study was to examine how trauma nurses relates to violence at work. The study was conducted through semi-structured interviews and a hermeneutic-sentence construction analysis has been used. The theoretical frameworks that was used in the study are social construction theory and the ideal victim. The result of the study showed that workplace violence frequently occurs and it also showed that psychological violence was the most common form. The trauma nurses usually don’t report this type of violence because of complicated reporting tools and a workplace culture that normalize violence from patients and relatives. The trauma nurses experience an implicit fear of being exposed of crime which limits them at their workplace. Suggested measures against workplace violence were education, simplified tools for report crime and increased endorsement from leadership. The conclusion of the study showed that the nurses need help to institute a zero-tolerance policy against violence to challenge their definition of violence.

Keywords: workplace violence, nurse, victim, perpetrator