Patient‐Relative Violence and Nurses' Well‐Being in Emergency, Intensive and Neonatal Care Settings: A Qualitative Descriptive Study

ABSTRACT Aims To examine how violence by patients' relatives towards nurses develops, escalates and is managed in emergency, intensive and neonatal intensive care and its implications for nurses' well‐being. Background Patient‐relative violence threatens nurses' well‐being and continuity of care where waiting, uncertainty, restricted access and family distress converge. Design Qualitative descriptive study using conventional content analysis. Methods Twenty‐one nurses in three units of one Turkish public hospital completed a self‐administered written qualitative survey in 2024. Each incident narrative was analysed as one case. Results Emergency incidents centred on waiting, crowding and contested triage, read by relatives as neglect or unfairness; intensive and neonatal incidents centred on visiting and infection‐control rules and fragmented information, read as exclusion from the family role. Escalation moved from complaint to spatial and digital coercion. Explanation resolved all four neonatal but only two of 12 emergency cases, where security was usually decisive. Conclusion Patient‐relative violence is a systems and boundary‐management problem as well as an interactional one. Prevention requires predictable family information, institutionally backed boundaries, pre‐assigned escalation roles and post‐incident support. Findings rest on nurses' written accounts from one hospital, without probing or relatives' perspectives and require multi‐site, multi‐perspective confirmation.