In HBO’s The Pitt, nurses are punched, grabbed, and choked while trying to care for patients. The scenes are fictional and dramatic, but they are not exaggerated. The physical danger nurses step into every single shift is painfully real. Across the country, nurses experience workplace violence with alarming regularity, facing physical assault, verbal abuse, threats, and intimidation from patients, family members, and visitors. Too often, this hostility is casually dismissed as “just part of the job.”
It isn’t, and we can no longer accept it as the cost of doing business in American health care.
As president of the American Nurses Association, I hear directly from nurses across every specialty who are physically and emotionally exhausted. They are tired of being told to simply absorb abuse, shake it off, and keep delivering compassionate, high-quality care. No nurse should ever have to make a silent calculation at the start of a shift about whether reporting an assault will cause administrative headaches, delay patient care, or invite retaliation from supervisors.
The numbers reveal a staggering hidden crisis: Nearly 1 in 4 nurses have been physically assaulted at work. Even more alarming, over 80 percent of health care workplace violence incidents are never officially reported. That silence is not evidence of a safe clinical environment. It is evidence of a broken system where too many nurses and other health care workers have been conditioned to believe that filing a report will change nothing, or worse, make their work lives more difficult.
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When violence goes unreported, it becomes normalized. And when it becomes normalized, the consequences turn fatal.
We see the ultimate cost of this inaction in headlines that break our hearts week after week. Joyce Grayson, a home health care nurse murdered during a visit. June Onkundi, a psychiatric nurse practitioner, fatally stabbed by a patient. Annette Flowers, killed while doing her job in a hospital. These were dedicated professionals who went to work to heal people and never came home to their families.
This crisis does not stay contained behind hospital doors. It directly threatens every patient and family member seeking care. When nurses are injured, traumatized, or forced to spend their shifts looking over their shoulders, the entire health care delivery system buckles. Care gets delayed, medical errors become more likely, and experienced bedside nurses walk away from the profession entirely. You simply cannot have safe patient care without safe workplaces.
Health care leaders in all care settings do not need to wait for government mandates to act. They have a moral and operational responsibility to protect their staff right now. They can establish transparent, zero-tolerance reporting systems; investigate every incident thoroughly; enforce evidence-based safety protocols; and include frontline nurses in designing security measures for their specific units.
However, voluntary measures across scattered health systems are not enough to protect 5.5 million registered nurses. Federal standards are urgently required.
The American Nurses Association is leading an effort to demand that Congress pass the Workplace Violence Prevention for Health Care and Social Service Workers Act (H.R. 2531 / S. 1232). This bipartisan legislation requires the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to establish and enforce a clear, evidence-based national workplace violence prevention standard tailored specifically to health care and social service settings. Crucially, it would mandate that employers develop and implement comprehensive prevention plans in collaboration with frontline nurses, and guarantee that nurses can report violent incidents without fear of retaliation or professional penalty.
We routinely call nurses heroes when they step up during public health emergencies, natural disasters, and mass-casualty events. Yet, the same nurses we celebrate in times of crisis too often face violence and preventable dangers at work. Nurses enter this profession to care for others, not to accept violence as part of the job or sacrifice their own safety.
It is time for Congress to stop offering empty praise, listen to the clinicians on the front lines, and pass the federal protections we desperately need.
Jennifer S. Mensik Kennedy is a nurse executive.
