Health equity advocates are working hard to address the abysmal statistics on violence targeting the nation’s health care workforce. The incidence of aggression, abuse and threats against health care professionals continues to rise, as this workforce community is five times more likely to suffer from workplace violence than professionals in other occupations. For this reason, widespread support is growing for the passage of the Safety from Violence for Healthcare Employees (SAVE) Act (H.R. 2584/S. 2768), which is legislation designed to protect health care workers from workplace violence.
The SAVE Act would criminalize the intentional assault of hospital employees, which has become a growing occurrence across the U.S. The findings of one recent study, for example, highlight that over seventy-five percent of American nurses had been the victim of assault in their career. Moreover, while the shortage of U.S. health care workers becomes an increasingly problematic phenomenon, hospital and health care center professionals continue to leave their jobs due to workplace violence.
This type of legislation is nothing new in other professional fields, such as laws that apply to aircraft and airport workers, but would be groundbreaking for medical and health care professionals. Proponents of the policies cite a broad range of critical negative impacts of violence against health care workers. Not only is it harmful and abusive on its face, but the workplace attacks also have been shown to interfere with patient care, and even harm family members of both the patients and health care workers, all of whom suffer the trauma sparked by workplace violence.
The local and national health equity communities are continuing to follow the movement of this legislation through Congress. The text of the bill can be found here.
