Aggression Risk Assessment Scale

[stacyayako, ADN, RN]

To those who work on an inpatient (or outpt) psych unit, does your facility have some variation of an aggression risk assessment scale? Pros? Cons? My unit currently doesn’t have one and I’m doing some research before taking it to management. Any input is highly appreciated!!

[Words Matter, BSN, RN]

I work at an inpatient acute care freestanding psych hospital. As a violence predictor we use the Broset Violence Checklist (BVC). The main con is users not assessing properly. The various categories are assigned a score based on that behavior being Present or Absent/Baseline. For example, if confusion is a person's current presentation, but it is also the patient's baseline, the nurse should tick Absent/Baseline which would score 0 for this part of the assessment. An uneducated nurse may tick Present and unknowingly flag the patient as an increased assault risk. Proper education and follow up can prevent this from happening. A lot of research went into choosing this assessment tool for our facility.

[stacyayako, ADN, RN]

I agree! The same is true with the Dynamic Appraisal of Situational Aggression (DASA), although I like that the DASA includes aggression against people, whereas BVC doesn’t. Thanks so much for your input!