Background:

Nurses are one of the groups most exposed to violence in the workplace. The objective of this study was to analyze the relationship between violence at work and engagement in a sample of nurses in Spain.

Methods:

A descriptive cross-sectional study was carried out in a national sample of Spanish nurses. A questionnaire was administered that collected the sociodemographic variables, the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (UWES-9) and an ad hoc scale on violence at work. The Mann-Whitney U test was performed as the statistical test with Bonferroni correction and the CHAID algorithm.

Results:

The sample consisted of a total of 1,648 active nurses. It was observed that 42.17% of them had personally suffered some type of aggression or violence in the workplace, verbal aggression being the most frequent. The results indicated that there was a negative association between work engagement and exposure to situations of violence at work.

Conclusions:

There is a relationship between having suffered attacks and the degree of work engagement against nurses, hence the need to establish effective preventive and intervention policies to promote an adequate work environment, and therefore stop episodes of violence in their initial stages.

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