The House of Representatives recently passed the Workplace Violence Prevention for Health Care and Social Service Workers Act. The bill requires the U.S. Department of Labor to come up with an occupational safety and health standard that mandates healthcare and social services employers put in place a detailed plan to protect their staff from workplace violence. Among the bill’s requirements are for healthcare employers to:

• Investigate violent incidents, risks or hazards in the workplace
• Give training and education to workers who may be at risk of violence
• Prohibit discrimination or retaliation against workers who report violence, threats or concerns

The legislation passed the House in November of last year and is awaiting action in the Senate.

Healthcare employers, meanwhile, will want to keep tabs of a case where the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia listened to oral arguments on January 9, The National Law Review reports. That case, Psychiatric Hosp. LLC v Sec’y of Labor, requests that the appeals court decide how much leeway to give the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in ordering hospitals to enact protections for nurses and other staff against patient violence.

Covette Rooney, Chief Administrative Law Judge at the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission, had ruled that the hospital violated OSHA standards because it did not have adequate staff protections to deal with violent patients and because it did not take reasonable actions to cut down knowable hazards. That hospital then went to appeals court.

“The case stemmed from a 2016 OSHA investigation, triggered by an anonymous employee complaint, which alleged that patient on staff violence was an ever-increasing problem,” The National Law Review reports. “Following an inspection, OSHA discerned that the hospital had several safety protocols in place, yet hospital employees told the inspectors that the measures were neither properly communicated nor implemented.”

California, Illinois, Minnesota, and Oregon are among states that already have passed their own regulations to deal with serious concerns.

New Jersey has a state law mandating that anyone assaulting healthcare providers be charged in the same way as if they had assaulted a law enforcement officer, NBC New York reports. Healthcare workers were subject to 67 counts of third- or second-degree aggravated assault charges last year, New Jersey State Courts found.

Of more than 3,500 emergency room doctors surveyed in 2018 by the American College of Emergency Physicians, 47% had been assaulted and 97% of the time the perpetrator was a patient. “The violence that occurs on a daily basis, it's known as the dirty little secret in health care,” says Edward VanWagner, a registered nurse, paramedic and firefighter. VanWagner also works for a company that teaches emergency responders how to defend themselves.

“The vast majority of assaults that occur in the healthcare setting are non-lethal in nature,” he adds. “But you don't have to be killed to be changed forever.”

Of workplace annual assaults over a three-year span, ranging from 23,540 and 25,630, 70% to 74% happened in a healthcare or social services environment, EHS Daily Advisor reports. Employers should set up a system to guard against patients and clients who have been violent in the past.

“For workers in all healthcare and social services settings, employers should provide staff with identification badges, preferably without last names; discourage workers from wearing necklaces or chains to prevent possible strangulation; and warn employees against wearing expensive jewelry or carrying large sums of money and keys or other items that could be used as weapons,” EHS Daily Advisor reports. “The use of head netting or a cap can prevent hair from being grabbed and used to pull or shove workers.”