ArticleJournal of racial and ethnic health disparities2026
How Do Weapons Screening Programs Reduce Armed Hospital Assault? A Scoping Review of Public Health Principles.
Article in Journal of racial and ethnic health disparities, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
1 citing paper in PubMed.
- Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
14 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
purposeHealthcare organizations are increasingly piloting weapons screening programs (WSPs) like metal detectors (MDs) to combat rising hospital workplace violence (WPV). This study identifies, analyzes, and concisely reports how the extant body of literature supports the ability of WSPs' to reduce absolute rates of hospital WPV according to public health principles.
methodsWe searched six online databases from July 2023 to December 2024 for full-length papers and abstracts of original research regarding WSPs at public entrances to US hospitals. Study quality and robustness were assessed using the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool and the 2010 Melnyk and Fineout-Overholt hierarchy of evidence, respectively.
resultsA total of 29 studies were included, and all were nonexperimental designs from academic institutions. Twenty-eight (96.6%) were quantitative descriptive studies, and one was qualitative. All studies ranked within the second lowest tier of experimental robustness with an average quality score of 85.5%. Only two studies directly measured absolute rates of hospital WPV before and after WSP implementation; neither demonstrated objectively lowered rates of WPV. Studies concluding efficacy of WSPs to lower rates of armed hospital WPV are steeped in circular feedback loops anchored in type 1 pseudodisease estimates of prevalence and efficacy where weapons presence is taken for prevalence of armed assault, and weapons removal is taken for reduction of armed assault. Proxy measurements like favorable public opinions and popularity of WSP practice secondarily reinforce extant literatures' conclusions of WSP efficacy.
conclusionsWe found no direct evidence that WSPs reduce absolute rates of hospital WPV based on public health principles. The results of our scoping review by no means suggest that armed WPV is an acceptable or negligible risk to hospital patients and providers. Rather, the low baseline prevalence of armed WPV suggests that even if WSPs were supremely reliable at stopping armed perpetrators with criminal intent, overall rates of hospital WPV would still climb because WSPs do not intervene upon the unarmed preponderance of hospital WPV and may inadvertently divert financial resources needed to improve the clinical factors driving those risks.
Indexed as
Identifiers
40064831What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.