Addressing work-related gendered violence against Victorian healthcare workers

Key findings

Work-related gendered violence is pervasive in the Victorian healthcare sector and harms employees’ physical and mental wellbeing, financial and work outcomes, the quality of care provided, and the healthcare sector as a whole. The Victorian healthcare sector is the state’s largest workforce, employing 1 in 10 working Victorians and needs to expand to meet growing healthcare demands for mental health and disability services. High employee turnover rates present a significant challenge for meeting this projected demand. As such, addressing gendered violence in the Victorian healthcare sector is both a pressing workplace safety issue for workers who deserve to be safe and respected, and a significant economic and social concern.

We are working with The Health and Community Services Union (HACSU) as research partners on their project, ‘Breaking the Silence: Prevention of Gendered Violence in Healthcare Settings’. As part of this ongoing work, we undertook a literature review to scope the current state of work-related gendered violence in the sector, bring together the available evidence and offer evidence-based solutions to this systemic issue.

In this review we found that work-related gendered violence toward healthcare workers is often enacted by a range of perpetrators, including by patients, participants, consumers, their relatives or visitors, and disproportionately affects women and minoritised genders. The nature of direct care, often involving prioritisation of patients’, participants’, and consumers’ needs and extended contact in isolation from other staff members, puts healthcare workers at particularly high risk of gendered violence. These risks are compounded by poor working conditions, understaffing, gender stereotypes, power imbalances, and organisational and social tolerance for gendered violence against health personnel.

The current reporting systems are not well-equipped to deal with the problem and many employees do not trust them to report instances of work-related gendered violence formally. Due to these barriers and insufficient available local data, this report identifies substantial gaps in knowledge about the prevalence of gendered violence, particularly involving workers in mental health and disability industries and healthcare workers from minoritised groups.

The welcomed legislative changes affirming the positive duty of governments and employers to prevent, address and reduce the risks of harassment and violence in Australian workplaces set the ground for addressing work-related gendered violence in the Victorian healthcare sector. However, prevention and management of gendered violence requires a holistic “whole of sector” approach including:

• the creation of safe and respectful workplaces; 
• changes to gendered violence policies; 
• effective, transparent, and fair complaint processes for workers; ongoing training for managers and staff; 
• and adequate funding from the government to ensure that these necessary measures can be introduced in all healthcare and community organisations.