Figure 1.

The Queensland Occupational Violence Patient Risk Assessment Tool (QOVPRAO, pronounced kvow-pro) provides a quick and effective method for evaluating patient’s potential for violence in the hospital without relying on a patient’s cooperation or putting the provider at any unknown risk in simply asking questions. It looks a history of aggression (as either noted in their chart or legal history), behavioral cues of the patient, and clinical presentation to assist providers in evaluating risk and provides a validated mechanism for quantifying risk during notes (low, moderate, high). Most importantly, each metric has a high negative predictive value (97.7–98.7), meaning that a patient with a score of zero is highly unlikely to pose a threat to healthcare providers. This figure, as well as the positive and negative predictive values were adapted from Cabilan et al.⁴¹