Dangerous employees: How to deal with a potential threat

Not every disgruntled employee is ready to lash out, but there are signs to watch for to make sure someone with violent tendencies doesn't act out in your practice.

By Larry Stevens, AMNews correspondent. June 25, 2007.

About once a year or so, an employee or student somewhere wreaks havoc at his company or school, killing, injuring, and often committing suicide. In the aftermath, the media are filled with experts offering advice on how to anticipate and prevent violent attacks.

The truth is that, like lightning strikes or plane crashes, homicidal attacks in the workplace are, while horrific, extremely rare.

But that doesn't mean medical practices can ignore the potential danger of employee attacks. Even non-lethal aggression -- hysterical yelling, pushing, stalking, "poison pen" letters, unwelcome sharing of pornography -- can have a devastating effect on employees, patients or vendors. And if a practice fails to take reasonable actions to identify volatile workers and protect people in the office from them, the outcome could bring declining employee morale, or a lawsuit.

Every physician-employer should have procedures in place to help identify people likely to explode in violence. But, most medical consultants say, forget the advice from TV's talking head profilers. Loners, people fixated on video games, people who can't make eye contact and people with emotional problems aren't necessarily violence-prone people. If you single out employees based on personality type, you may be asking for legal trouble.

"We never advise administrators or doctors to try to profile people who may cause violence. They're not trained for that, and even professionals often get it wrong," says Robert Levy, president of Corporate Counseling Associates, a workplace training and consulting company in New York.