In Their Own Words

Don’t Normalize Workplace Violence Against Nurses

LDI Fellows Say the Issue is One of Patient Safety and Quality Care—and Should Be Viewed Not as Inevitable, but Addressable Through Federal Reform

May 20, 2026

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A group of nurses sitting in a hospital hallway

This Commentary originally appeared in Health Affairs Scholar on March 31, 2026.

Key Points

Workplace violence is a persistent structural problem in health care settings that often goes unreported and has serious consequences for clinicians and patients alike.
Workplace violence is a structural consequence of health care environments that are understaffed, overwhelmed, and poorly supported by behavioral health, security infrastructure, and regulatory oversight.
When clinicians must prioritize their own safety in a hostile work environment that fails to protect them, patient safety and health care quality inevitably suffer.

When a patient in severe alcohol withdrawal struck Nurse X in the jaw, they did what nurses across the country have learned to do: stabilize the patient, finish the shift short-staffed, and quiet the tremor in their hands on the drive home. In the days that followed, they caught themselves scanning doorways before entering rooms and lying awake replaying the impact. Their colleagues felt no shock; several had been threatened or groped that same week. Recent events underscore just how routine such violence has become. In Philadelphia, three nurses were injured in a hit-and-run while stabilizing a patient outside the emergency department. In Western Pennsylvania, at UPMC Altoona, two nurses were assaulted within weeks of each other. All of the authors, who have practiced or currently practice at the bedside, have seen firsthand how violence that would halt operations in any other industry is too often treated as an unavoidable condition of clinical care.

The familiar absence of alarm among clinicians reveals a more profound issue. Violence against health care workers has become so normalized that institutions respond with resignation rather than prevention. The true systemic failure lies not in the behavior of patients in crisis, but in this normalization itself. The gendered nature of the nursing workforce has shaped how nurses are perceived and treated within health care settings.¹ Importantly, it also influences the degree to which mistreatment toward nurses is tolerated or dismissed.

The scale of workplace violence is stark in the latest federal data (2023).² Across all private industries, intentional violence caused 41 270 serious injuries: health care and social assistance alone accounted for 12,980, nearly one-third of the national total. Of the 15 470 injuries from unintentional or unknown person-initiated actions across all industries, 6780 occurred in health care. Together, these figures reveal that health care workers sustain more than 19 700 person-related injuries, representing a disproportionate share of the national burden and confirming that workplace violence is a structural, predictable occupational hazard in clinical settings.

Read the full Commentary here.

References:

Dunn J. Diminishment by design: the role of class, gender and architecture in shaping the nursing profession. Nurs Philos. 2025;26(4):e70042. https://doi.org/10.1111/nup.70042
Survey of Occupational Injuries and Illnesses Data. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Accessed February 2, 2026. https://www.bls.gov/iif/nonfatal-injuries-and-illnesses-tables.htm