Approaches to preventing workplace sexual harassment of nurses or minimising its adverse consequences: a scoping review

TL;DR

This review explores existing strategies to prevent or reduce the impact of sexual harassment in nursing workplaces, highlighting gaps in research and effectiveness.

Contribution

The study systematically categorizes approaches to address sexual harassment of nurses, emphasizing the need for multi-level interventions and further research.

Findings

Most approaches focus on individual or organizational levels, with no network-level strategies identified.

Education and incident reporting were the most frequently mentioned strategies, but their effectiveness remains understudied.

Only 12 of the 32 included studies were empirical, indicating a lack of robust evidence for most interventions.

Abstract

Workplace sexual harassment of nurses is a common problem worldwide, influencing nurses’ well-being and the quality of patient care. Widely applicable recommendations and specific guidance for health care organisations are lacking. There is a need for systematically developed and evaluated interventions to prevent and mitigate sexual harassment of nurses. Hence, this study aims to identify existing approaches to preventing sexual harassment of nurses or minimising its adverse consequences at the individual, organisational and network levels to provide a basis for the development of appropriate interventions.

A systematic scoping review was conducted, involving a systematic search of the literature in four medical databases in July 2024, complemented by a supplementary search including grey literature. All study designs and non-scientific sources referencing empirical or non-empirical research were included if they focused on nurses and approaches to preventing workplace sexual harassment or mitigating its adverse consequences. A thematic analysis was conducted, and a numerical summary was made to categorise the approaches and to quantify their frequency.

Out of 3,912 records identified through database searches, 32 records published between 1984 and 2024 were included. Twelve followed the IMRAD (introduction, methods, results, and discussion) structure and were empirical. Of the twenty non-IMRAD records, only four included empirical data; the rest were theoretical or opinion based. Approaches to preventing sexual harassment of nurses or mitigating its consequences were situated at the individual or organisational levels, but none extended beyond a single organisation to address the network level. The approaches were analysed and categorised into eight domains: (1) ‘organisational culture’, (2) ‘infrastructure and working environment’, (3) ‘leadership’, (4) ‘guidelines’, (5) ‘reporting of incidents, (6) ‘education’, (7) ‘nurses’ approaches to reacting or coping’, and (8) ‘patient-centred approaches’.

A wide range of approaches at the individual and organisational levels are available to prevent sexual harassment of nurses or to minimise its adverse consequences, with education and reporting of incidents being the most frequently mentioned. However, for most of the approaches, research on their effectiveness and feasibility in practice is lacking. To systematically evaluate the approaches identified within different contexts, further research is needed.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12912-025-04179-2.

Figures