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This April, a bipartisan coalition reintroduced legislation aimed at protecting workers on the frontlines of the American healthcare system. The Workplace Violence Prevention for Health Care and Social Service Workers Act, championed by Rep. Joe Courtney (D-Conn.), Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), and Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), seeks to address a crisis that has gone unchecked for far too long: the alarming rise in workplace violence in healthcare settings.
The measure will protect healthcare and social service workers, including home health nurses, social workers and physicians, who make up over 75 percent of all victims of workplace violence nationwide. Even more disturbing, they are nearly four times more likely to suffer serious injuries from violent incidents than workers in any other field.
The proposed legislation would require the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to establish a long-overdue, enforceable standard to protect these professionals. It's a move that workers, unions and advocates have been demanding for years.
“No worker—especially those we rely on for care—should be injured or killed on the job,” Courtney says. “Our legislation would put proven tactics into practice in hospitals and healthcare settings across the country to prevent violence before it happens.”
“We rely on our healthcare workers every day to protect our communities and, in turn, we need to protect them from senseless acts of violence,” Baldwin says.
Courtney has been leading the charge on this issue for more than a decade. In 2013, he prompted the Government Accountability Office to investigate violence in the healthcare sector. The GAO’s findings led to a call for OSHA to take action; yet, nearly a decade later, healthcare workers are still waiting. With bipartisan support, Courtney has managed to pass the bill in the House multiple times, but now the push is on for final enactment.
On the ground, nurses and healthcare professionals are feeling the strain. Banita Herndon, a registered nurse and president of the Health Professionals and Allied Employees local at University Hospital in Newark, N.J., describes an alarming rise in workplace assaults—often tied to short staffing.
“Healthcare workers are five times more likely to be assaulted than those in other professions,” Herndon says. “This new law can't come soon enough. Along with training hospital staff on effective strategies to de-escalate violent situations, a law like the one being proposed could be a great tool for us to keep hospital staff as well as our patients safe.”
The AFT has long pushed OSHA to establish an enforceable standard that would require healthcare and social assistance employers to develop comprehensive prevention programs in direct collaboration with frontline workers.
Violence in healthcare settings is a preventable crisis—and it’s affecting not just workers, but the patients who depend on them. AFT President Randi Weingarten underscores the urgency: “Our nurses, health techs, social service workers and other professionals deserve much better than their current reality. They take care of us when we need them—and devote their careers to looking after the aging, the sick and the injured—yet they’re still, after all these years, fighting for basic, enforceable safety standards. That’s why the AFT launched our Code Red campaign to tackle violence, secure safe patient limits, and improve the quality of care patients receive, and it’s why this bill is so crucial.”
Weingarten has praised the lawmakers behind the bill and urges Congress to act swiftly. [Adrienne Coles]
