Gordon Lee Gillespie et al.| An Integrative Review of the Reporting and Underreporting of Workplace Aggression in Healthcare Settings International Journal of Nursing 5(1), 2016 1 An Integrative Review of the Reporting and Underreporting of Workplace Aggression in Healthcare Settings Gordon Lee Gillespie *a , Susie Leming-Lee b , Terri Crutcher c Keywords: acceptance & commitment therapy; depression; ACT ; psychological flexibility. Introduction: Background: ORIGINAL ARTICLE Objectives. Despite the prevalence of workplace aggression, workplace aggression is grossly underreported. The purpose of this paper is to review the state of the science for the reporting and underreporting of WPA enacted by patients and/or visitors and then make recommendations for increasing the reporting of WPA. Design. An integrative review process was used to select peer-reviewed articles describing the state of the body of evidence for the reporting and underreporting of workplace aggression. Data sources. Articles were extracted from the Scopus database, a robust search engine that simultaneously searches over 20,000 peer-reviewed journals from over 5,000 international publishers. Review methods. Article inclusion criteria were publication date between January 1, 2000 and October 24, 2014, healthcare workers as the study population, and dependent variable related to workplace aggression reporting or workplace aggression underreporting. The initial search yielded 237 citations. All abstracts were read for direct or indirect relevance At the conclusion of this initial review, 33 articles met inclusion criteria. The article reference lists were reviewed and seven additional articles were assessed for inclusion. Twelve articles were retained, read in full, and critiqued. Results. Twelve articles were retained, read in full, and critiqued. The underreporting of workplace aggression was as high as 95%. Reasons for not reporting workplace aggression included perceived lack of organizational change after reporting, violence considered part of the job, and aggression not intentional. Reasons for reporting workplace aggression included workplace aggression that was perceived as intentional, when administrators took action based on incident reports, when the process for reporting was quick, easy, and efficient, when aggression was physical or resulted in an injury. Conclusion. The reporting of workplace aggression is paramount to the future success of prevention interventions. Any changes made to increase the reporting of workplace aggression will require healthcare worker buy-in as well as organizational and administrator support to be effective. . *Corresponding Author Associate Professor, Deputy Director, Occupational Health Nursing Program, University of Cincinnati College of Nursing, 223 Procter Hall P.O. Box 21-0038, Cincinnati, OH 45221-0038 Email: gillesgl@ucmail.uc.edu aAssociate Professor, Deputy Director, Occupational Health Nursing Program, University of Cincinnati College of Nursing b Assistant Professor, Vanderbilt University | Vander Bilt · Department of Nursing c Assistant Professor, Vanderbilt University | Vander Bilt · School of Nursing,, ABSTRACT © 2016 International Journal of Nursing This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited