Dave Holmes is Professor and University Research Chair in Forensic Nursing, School of Nursing, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Ottawa, Canada and co-editor of both Critical Interventions in the Ethics of Healthcare and Abjectly Boundless: Boundaries, Bodies and Health Work. Trudy Rudge is Professor at Sydney Nursing School, University of Sydney, Australia, and co-editor of Abjectly Boundless: Boundaries, Bodies and Health Work. Amélie Perron is Assistant Professor, School of Nursing, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Ottawa, Canada.

'This is a work of unprecedented importance. This book exposes and examines violence that has been hidden - violence in health care settings. Even in the face of extensive exposure of violence in the home, workplace violence in health care has been carefully denied and left to fester as a dis-ease that infects all efforts to achieve quality in health care. Yet workplace violence in health care is all too familiar to health care providers and patients. It is embedded in institutional structures, and fed by high levels of stress and fear. As the authors acknowledge, everyone who enters the health care system is vulnerable as both a victim and a perpetrator. With new understandings of the dynamics of violence in health care, health care workers can begin to reverse the damage and turn the tide of accepted, dangerous and harmful patterns of behavior that can only be interpreted as violent. This book needs to be at the top of the list for any administrator, manager, teacher, clinician or practitioner, and patient advocate. It offers insight, hope and ultimately a path for healing to take place in health care.' Peggy L Chinn, University of Connecticut School of Nursing, USA and Editor, Advances in Nursing Science 'The overarching thrust of this challenging and coherent collection is that both health professionals and patients are subject to techniques of coercion, violence and control that permeate both the corporeal and the imaginary spaces of "care". The analyses reveal numerous disturbing institutionalised technologies of ideological, disciplinary and cultural power and surveillance that are elaborately deployed through managerialist rationalities or the apparently benign, humanist mask of "vocational" practice.' Anthony Pryce, City University, UK ’For most readers the phrase ’violence in healthcare settings’ would probably evoke images of disturbed, distraught or drunken patients and/or their relatives lashing out at health service workers. But, by its titl

• Contents: Foreword, Dave Holmes; Introduction: (re)thinking violence in health care settings, Dave Holmes, Trudy Rudge, Amélie Perron and Isabelle St-Pierre; Part I Institutional and Managerial Violence: A critical reflection on the use of behaviour modification programs in forensic psychiatry settings, Dave Holmes and Stuart J. Murray; The violence of tolerance in a multicultural workplace: examples from nursing, Trudy Rudge, Virginia Mapedzahama, Sandra West and Amélie Perron; Changing discourses of blame in nursing and healthcare, Hannah Cooke; Hospital policies regarding violence in the workplace: a discourse analysis, Penny Powers; Exploring violence in a forensic hospital: a theoretical experimentation, Amélie Perron and Trudy Rudge; Nurses' failure to report elder abuse in long-term care: an exploratory study, Gloria Hamel-Lauzon and Sylvie Lauzon. Part II Horizontal Violence: Foucault and the nexus between violence and power: the context of intra/inter professional aggression, Isabelle St-Pierre; Examining nurse-to-nurse horizontal violence and nurse-to-student vertical violence through the lens of phenomenology, Sandra P. Thomas; The rise of violence in HIV/AIDS prevention campaigns: a critical discourse analysis, Marilou Gagnon and Jean Daniel Jacob; Bullying in the workplace: a qualitative study of newly licensed registered nurses, Shellie Simons and Barbara Mawn; Sexual health nursing assessments: examining the violence of intimate exposures, Patrick O'Byrne and Cory Woodyatt; Bullying on the back-channels: everyday interpersonal communicative relations in telephone talk as a space for covert forms of professional manipulation, Jackie Cook and Colette Snowden. Part III Patients' Violence: Assessment of risk and special observations in mental health practice: a comparison of forensic and non-forensic settings, Elizabeth Mason-Whitehead and Tom Mason; Policing pornography in high-secure care: the discursive construction of gendered inequality, David Mer