Tran, Sieu. “Violence in Clinical Environments.”
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Clinical environments, such as doctor’s offices, hospitals, and emergency rooms, are places where patients come to seek medical assistance. They are meant to be places where patients rest and recover from their physical and mental illnesses. People come to these locations to receive care and love. However, research suggests that violence in clinical environments has increased radically in recent years. There are two types of clinical violence: macroagression, large-scale and obvious acts of violence, and microagression, smaller and less obvious acts of violence. The violence in clinical settings includes acts directed from doctors to patients and acts from patients toward medical staff and students. There is a also a structural level of violence created by the hospital system itself. Violence contributes significantly to the decline in quality of health care for all involved. This phenomenon poses immense problems to health care systems, but approaches to reduce the violence in clincial settings seem slow to develop.