The prevalence of Mobbing in the nursing staff of an institutional hospital in Mexico

Introduction
Psychosocial factors are conditions in a laboral situation related to work organization, content and conduct of the task, with the capacity to affect the development of labor and workers’ health. The analysis of these factors is important to promote wellness and prevent illness linked to them. Within psychosocial risks, the Mobbing is one of the most important. Mobbing describes situations where a worker suffers psychological attacks by one or more members of labor group, which may cause disturbances in mental and physical health. It has been reported that nurses are workers affected by Mobbing; international studies suggest that Mobbing is the most common psychosocial risk in this profession.

Methods
We performed a transversal, prospective, descriptive and observational study in the nursing staff of one institutional hospital in Mexico. The total study population was 162 workers. The collection of data was based on the application of the instrument IVAPT-PANDO (Inventory of Violence and Psychological Harassment at Work), which describes: presence of psychological violence events in the work, their intensity and the presence of Mobbing, in this population sample. Univariate analysis was performed to obtain frequency measures of central tendency. Subsequently was obtained bivariate analysis. The statistic and descriptive analysis, was carried out by the statistical software Stata 9 and Microsoft Office Excel 2007.

Results
The Mobbing prevalence was 17.28% (28 cases, all in women). The most frequent Mobbing type corresponded to descending (53.6%). The violence prevalence was 75.31% (122 cases).

Discussion
We obtained significant differences in line with workplace, genre and presence of violence, with Mobbing. Is important recognize that all Mobbing cases also reported violence events. It is necessary to adopt measures to avoid the development of Mobbing and violence (individual and group interventions direct to the modification of workplace, social support and improvement communication between the workers).