OAHHS Fall/Winter 2018

16 » A magazine for and about Oregon Community Hospitals. Like employees at every Oregon hospital, Grande Ronde’s staff regularly confronted scenarios with the potential to turn violent, from psychiatric holds and attempted medication theft to the everyday interpersonal conflicts the stress of hospitalization can stir up. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration estimates that health care and social assistance workers are almost five times more likely to be injured on the job and require time off because of workplace violence than people in other professions. LaRochelle was determined to mitigate that risk for Grande Ronde’s employees, but how? Together with her staff, she tested approaches from non-aggressive psychological and physical employee training to expensive facility safety assessments, but the results were invariably underwhelming and often quite expensive. LaRochelle began to wonder if the evidence-based violence reduction strategies she sought even existed: “We didn’t have the tools to be effective. I was scrambling to learn, taking online classes and talking with my peers, but I just didn’t have the right resources to go to.” Then, in 2014, Grande Ronde CEO Jim Mattes told LaRochelle that the Oregon Association of Hospitals and Health Systems was convening a Workplace Safety Initiative Work Group. She was all in. Recalls LaRochelle: “I said, ‘Sign me up! When does it start?’” In this way, Grande Ronde became one of five Oregon hospitals to participate in the workplace violence project—a broad, multi-organization effort to sustainably improve the safety of Oregon’s hospitals and, eventually, to create a safety toolkit that would empower other hospitals FOR OREGON’S HOSPITALS, A SMARTER APPROACH TO VIOLENCE PREVENTION Together with its partners, OAHHS is tackling workplace violence, one Oregon hospital at a time. By Erin J. Bernard Grande Ronde Hospital Director of Facilities Elaine LaRochelle knew there had to be a better way to combat workplace violence at her small rural hospital.