A strategic way to the effective management of WPV should prioritize training courses focused on: constructing HCW-patient relationship, improving the workers' communication skills, accurate reporting of each violent incident, and improving the labor context through management commitment and employee involvement in WPV prevention programs. A special effort is required in implementing workplace design effective in minimizing stressful conditions in waiting rooms which turned out to be the most frequent site of assaults.

Current literature has increasingly highlighted the risk of spreading the SARS-COV-2 infection in healthcare settings and showed the need for occupational health surveillance of HCWs during the current epidemiological emergency from COVID-19, as a preventive measure to minimize the spread of the infection. The purpose of this narrative review was to evaluate the literature and discover what the latest developments are about the management of the occupational health surveillance of healthcare workers (HCWs) during COVID-19 pandemic. We searched for publications in MEDLINE, Pubmed and Google Scholar using selected keywords. Each article was reviewed and categorized into one or more of the following three categories based on its subject matter: early diagnosis of COVID-19 in HCWs, detection of worker susceptibility to severe COVID-19, medical examination of HCWs returning to work after COVID-19. Selected articles showed the RT-PCR test for Sars-CoV-2 as the gold standard to enable rapid identification of infected HCWs; an effective schedule of occupational health surveillance allows the identification of the susceptibility of the workers to severe Covid-19 and protect HCWs returning to work from the disease. The findings of the present narrative review show the need to strenghten the occupational health surveillance of HCWs during the current COVID-19 pandemic, with the aim not only to contain the spread of the infection in healthcare settings, but also to protect HCWs coming back to work after the disease.

The prevention of needlestick injuries (NSIs) in nurses employed in Emergency Departments (EDs) represents a special issue for healthcare organizations globally. Stressful working conditions, lack of organizational arrangements and lack of supporting one another at work, may contribute to increase the risk of NSIs. We conducted an observational study to analyze: 1) the effectiveness of organizational interventions to minimize the occurrence of NSIs in ED nurses; 2) to measure the impact of such interventions on the safety budget. The occurrence of NSIs detected after organizational level interventions was significantly lower than the occurrence observed previously such interventions (p<0,05). By results, cost saving from managing fewer NSIs than the previous period was found. The study shows that the proactive, integrated and comprehensive management of organizational features at workplace brings benefits to employees and reduces the burden of the occurrence of NSIs. As result of the reduced NSIs frequency, the overall costs for follow-up of injured workers were reduced. (www.actabiomedica.it)