Health care workers accounted for 73 percent of all nonfatal workplace injuries and illnesses caused by violence in the United States, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics tabulations of 2018 survey data, and New York responded in 2024 with a statute, Public Health Law Section 2832, that requires general hospitals and nursing homes to run written workplace violence prevention programs with annual security assessments, per the law's text.
Health Work NY publishes information, not legal advice. This article reviews what the violence data show, what the new New York requirements oblige hospitals and nursing homes to do, and what the law does not do. Union and hospital characterizations are identified as theirs; no individual worker or patient is named, and no incident described here implies reporting access to any specific facility.
How common is violence against health care workers?
Official counts make health care the leading industry for workplace violence by a wide margin. Beyond the 73 percent share of violence-caused recordable injuries and illnesses, Bureau of Labor Statistics case data show assault rates in health care and social assistance running well above the private-industry average in every recent survey year, per the same federal tables. A 2016 Government Accountability Office review found healthcare workers faced rates of nonfatal violence at least five times the general workforce rate, per the GAO's synthesis of federal data. Researchers in occupational health consistently note that the recorded figures understate incidence, because healthcare workers often treat assaults as part of the job and decline to file — a pattern documented in NIOSH-funded studies and in state surveys of emergency department staff.
Who is at greatest risk?
The risk concentrates in settings where workers cannot step away from patients: emergency departments, psychiatric units, and long-term care. Federal case data show nursing assistants and aides, who combine heavy physical contact with the lowest pay bands in the sector, among the most frequently assaulted titles, per BLS occupation-level tables, and the GAO's 2016 review flagged emergency department staff as a distinct high-risk group. Verbal threats and harassment, which mostly go unrecorded in injury statistics, appear at far higher rates in worker surveys, per studies published in occupational health journals — meaning the formal counts describe the floor, not the ceiling.
What does the New York law require?
Section 2832 of the Public Health Law, adopted in the 2024 legislative session, directs general hospitals and nursing homes to establish written workplace violence prevention programs, per the statutory text. The required components include an annual workplace security assessment, a prevention plan built on that assessment, staff training, and incident reporting systems, per the statute and the employer-side law firm summaries published after adoption. The law took effect following a statutory phase-in period after signing in 2024, and the state Department of Health holds oversight, per the same texts. The measure followed more than a decade of advocacy by the New York State Nurses Association, whose account of the bill — an interested party — is that voluntary hospital programs had proven too easy to skip; hospital associations argued during the session that the requirements were workable but warned about security-cost burdens, their framing as interested parties.
Related stories: Health care workers get hurt on the job at rates above almost every other industry · Union membership in New York health care, by the numbers.
What other rules already applied?
Two layers predate the 2024 statute. New York's workplace violence prevention rule for public employers, in force since 2006 and administered by the state Department of Labor, already required prevention programs in state-run facilities, including psychiatric hospitals, per the department's published guidance. At the federal level, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has long cited employers under the general duty clause for unaddressed violence hazards, and the agency published inspection guidance for health care and social service settings, per OSHA's published instructions. The 2024 statute adds the hospital- and nursing-home-specific written-program obligation on top of both, per the legislative summaries.
What does the law not do?
It does not criminalize new conduct, alter assault prosecutions, or create a private right of individual damages beyond what exists in general law, per the statutory text and employer-side summaries — it obliges facilities to prevent, record, and train. It also does not set staffing minimums for security response, which unions sought and which remains a committee-level question in unionized settings. Workers injured in assaults pursue the same remedies as before: workers' compensation for injury, criminal complaint where warranted, and — in unionized facilities — contractual security provisions.
What should a worker do after an assault?
The facility's violence prevention program is now required to include reporting channels, per Section 2832, and using them creates the record the annual assessments draw on. Beyond the facility: medical care and a workers' compensation claim for injury, per state workers' compensation procedures; a police report where the worker chooses; and, where the facility's program is missing or ignored, a complaint to the Department of Health, which holds oversight under the statute. None of these steps requires proving intent by the facility, and none substitutes for the criminal law's treatment of assault itself.
Do violence prevention programs actually reduce incidents?
The honest answer from the published evaluations is: some of them, partially, and measurement is difficult. Studies of emergency department interventions published in occupational and emergency-medicine journals through the early 2020s report reductions in recorded incidents after combined measures — training, panic alarms, flagging systems for patients with prior violence histories, and redesigned intake spaces — per the studies' own outcome reports, though most are single-site series rather than controlled trials, and improved reporting can temporarily raise counts. Federal guidance has filled the evidence gap with process standards: OSHA's health care inspection instructions describe the program elements inspectors look for, per the agency's published guidance, and the state statute borrows the same architecture. What no evaluation claims is that programs eliminate assault risk; the reasonable reading of the literature, per a synthesis the GAO published alongside its 2016 review, is that documented programs shorten response times and raise reporting rates, which is a different outcome than fewer assaults — and one worth demanding separately.