A new report jointly published by KFF Health News and NPR takes a closer look at how “violence against healthcare workers and staffing shortages” are fueling hospital strikes.
Some takeaways from the story:
- “The prevalence of workplace violence in healthcare has fueled strikes in states such as Louisiana, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Michigan.”
- One nurse told the outlets, “People will question me and be like, ‘Why are you still working in a place if you’re treated like this?’ [But] it’s the same everywhere I go.”
- “Nationwide, hospital workers are seven times as likely to be injured on the job due to violent acts as members of the general working population, according to the most recent data available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.”
- The American Hospital Association has been lobbying Congress “to make assaulting healthcare workers a federal crime that would carry up to 10 years in prison. At least 45 states…have enacted similar laws. But workplace safety experts say there is no evidence that such laws have reduced the incidence of violence against healthcare workers.”
- “The rise in violence against healthcare workers has caught the attention of the Joint Commission… [which] released national performance goals that took effect in January and require hospitals to be properly staffed and that staff be trained ‘to provide safe, quality care.’ But no federal law limits the number of patients in a nurse’s care across healthcare settings, despite the nation’s largest nurses union, National Nurses United, having pressed for a national standard since 2018.”
- “A worker safety and health policy expert at Georgetown University said the health provisions in congressional Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act will squeeze hospitals’ budgets in the next few years. When funding dries up, she said, ‘protecting workers is going to be the first thing that gets cut.’”
Read the full story here.
