Violence within organizations in the health and medico-social sectors, comparative analysis France-Romania

Violence at work constitutes a social problem at the international level and, according to WHO (2002), is a global challenge. In the health and medico-social sector, it is increasingly expressed in political, institutional and professional concern. This is the case in France and Romania. However, the figures which covers this phenomenon in each of these two countries, are they identical? So that's a comparison we're looking at. The aim of this article is to present the theoretical and methodological framework of the comparison, specifying the segments studied, after identifying possible national particularities in the way of apprehending violence in the health and medico-social sector.In order to avoid falling into the trap of ethnocentrism, we choose to construct a definition of violence not from predefined categories, but the experience of the individual, in this case caregivers, which will be the focus of this comparative research. The thesis of the research is that the experience of violence of the health professionals is related to the specificities of the organization (which requires to study the social relations of work) and the relation of service (which leads to analyze the Relations between users and professionals), whose transformations are specific to each of the national contexts. The first objective of this research is an objective of knowledge: what is the prevalence of the phenomenon in each of the two countries selected? How is it reflected in each national context? What are the patterns of violence from one country to another? Can we identify common figures? Do national specificities appear? The second objective is explanatory; We will seek to identify the factors by which the experience of professional violence varies. We hypothesize that the experience of violence is all the stronger (at the individual level) and more widespread (at the level of a service, a unit or an institution) than the relationship with the profession of caregivers Is distant from the conditions of practice on the one hand and institutional expectations on the other. We hypothesize that the experience of violence varies according to the type of response the organization gives to violence, the lack of response exacerbating the feeling of violence. Our third hypothesis is that the victim's expression varies in the opposite direction to the sense of institutional and professional recognition of caregivers. In order to understand the caregivers' experience, and in line with the epistemological approach adopted, we will carry out a victimization survey asking the respondents what they experience as violence in the exercise of their profession while collecting data on their profession (work, professional ideology), relations within the service and with users and their families, and data on the organization (service, unit, establishment) and its functioning.