Introduction: Workplace violence is one of the issues that nurses face in clinical practice, which needs to be studied. One of the most eventful clinical environments is a psychiatric ward. The aim of this study was to determine workplace violence status, vulnerable and preventive factors among nurses working in psychiatric wards.

Materials  and Methods: In this study, 183 nurses were selected from psychiatric wards in Razi Psychiatric Center in Tehran, by simple random sampling. Data gathered with "International Workplace Violence Questionnaire". The questionnaire contains 4 subscales, physical, mental, sexual and rational violence and three open ended questions. Content and face validity were measured by opinion of experts and reliability was confirmed by test-retest (r=0.73).Data analyzed with descriptive statistics methods by SPSS/18.

Findings: Prevalence of workplace violence was 71% in one year period. Physical and psychological violence, respectively, with a frequency of 4.93% and 6.71%, respectively racial and sexual violence, respectively, with a frequency of 1.19%, and 5.5% lower than subjects who had suffered violence. Majority of samples’ reaction (39.9%) was to calm the aggressive person. Furthermore, most of them (61.2%) supposed that providing educational course of violence control and 59.6% thought that providing a management system to report control is necessary.

Conclusion: Psychiatric nurses permanently exposed to a variety of physical and verbal violence. Providing function for prevention is suggested.