(Re)Thinking Violence in Health Care Settings

'This is a work of unprecedented importance. This book exposes and examines violence that has been hidden - violence in health care settings. Even in the face of extensive exposure of violence in the home, workplace violence in health care has been carefully denied and left to fester as a dis-ease that infects all efforts to achieve quality in health care. Yet workplace violence in health care is all too familiar to health care providers and patients. It is embedded in institutional structures, and fed by high levels of stress and fear. As the authors acknowledge, everyone who enters the health care system is vulnerable as both a victim and a perpetrator. With new understandings of the dynamics of violence in health care, health care workers can begin to reverse the damage and turn the tide of accepted, dangerous and harmful patterns of behavior that can only be interpreted as violent. This book needs to be at the top of the list for any administrator, manager, teacher, clinician or practitioner, and patient advocate. It offers insight, hope and ultimately a path for healing to take place in health care.' Peggy L Chinn, University of Connecticut School of Nursing, USA and Editor, Advances in Nursing Science 'The overarching thrust of this challenging and coherent collection is that both health professionals and patients are subject to techniques of coercion, violence and control that permeate both the corporeal and the imaginary spaces of "care". The analyses reveal numerous disturbing institutionalised technologies of ideological, disciplinary and cultural power and surveillance that are elaborately deployed through managerialist rationalities or the apparently benign, humanist mask of "vocational" practice.' Anthony Pryce, City University, UK ’For most readers the phrase ’violence in healthcare settings’ would probably evoke images of disturbed, distraught or drunken patients and/or their relatives lashing out at health service workers. But, by its titl