Prevalence of Verbal Abuse Among Doctors in Tertiary Care Hospital

Abstract

Introduction: Verbal abuse is the act of forcefully criticizing, insulting or denouncing another person.
Verbal abuse can be devastating to doctors and may cause long lasting emotional and psychological
damage. This study aims to find the prevalence of verbal abuse among doctors in tertiary care
hospital.

Methods: This descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted among doctors in a tertiary care
hospitals, Chitwan from January to July, 2019 after taking ethical approval. Convenience sampling
was done. Self administered questionnaire was distributed and data was collected. Point estimate
at 95% CI was done for binary data along with frequency and proportion. Data were entered and
calculations were done in Microsoft excel.

Results: Verbal abuse was found among 80 (33.3%) respondents at 95% Confidence Interval (27.51-
39.09%) and most 51 (63.8%) of perpetrators were relatives of the patients. Most 38 (47.5%) of the
doctors were often worried in workplace. Incident of the verbal abuse was more 35 (43.6%) in
morning and least 14 (17.4%) in night. Most 22 (27.5%) of the doctors did not take any action for
incident although most 42 (52.5 %) of the doctors were encouraged by colleagues to take action.

Conclusions: Prevalence of verbral abuse among the doctors were found out to be similar as the
previous studies conducted in similar settings. This study has shown that doctors were frequently
verbal abused by patient’s relatives and were abused mostly in morning shift and were often worried
in workplace.