(The Center Square) – Legislation to protect health care staff from workplace violence passed the House Tuesday. It promises to enshrine OSHA recommendations into law, supporting hospitals to create violence prevention committees.
The bill had been introduced during each legislative session since 2019 but finally found a foothold following a fatal shooting and hostage situation at UPMC Memorial in York earlier this year.
“Over and over again, health care workers are reporting that the managers who have been making the decisions about security systems are not keeping them safe,” said the bill’s prime sponsor Rep. Leanne Krueger, D-Brookhaven.
If enacted, the bill would require facilities to create committees including medical staff that evaluate security risks and develop plans to address them. It would also offer support for affected workers and protect them from retaliation.
Krueger noted that “health care workers accounted for 73% of all nonfatal workplace injuries and illnesses due to violence in 2018 alone.” The statistic is demonstrative of a bleak trend that many say has only worsened since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
A 2024 survey from the Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals showed that 66% of respondents had personally experienced violence at work, a jump from 50% in 2021.
Krueger added that 72% of those respondents said “their hospital or facility does not do a good job of protecting them” from the risks posed by the very patients they serve.
“These are unacceptable statistics,” said the bill’s co-sponsor Rep. Bridget Kosierowski, D-Scranton, a veteran nurse herself.
Yet, not all agree that adding more regulatory burdens to hospital administration would help to solve the problem. Rep. Seth Grove, in whose district the fatal shooting of Patrolman Andrew Duarte occurred, said, “Nothing in this bill would have fixed that.”
Grove advocated instead for measures that would increase the power of security forces to respond with force and protect them from legal action like civil suits.
Rep. Joe Hohenstein, D-Philadelphia, called Grove out saying that punishment has been proven to be an ineffective deterrent for crime.
“Our best solutions come from that workforce itself,” said Hohenstein. “We have to trust the nurses.”
Another advocate for the bill was Rep. Arvind Venkat, D-Pittsburgh, himself an emergency room doctor.
“I’ve been the subject of verbal abuse. I’ve had threats made against me in the emergency department, and most egregiously, I’ve had patients who have swung at me,” Venkat told the house, explaining that for many health care workers, “It’s just part of the job.”
“It can’t just be part of the job,” he said. “When health professionals are not empowered in their workplace to deal with their work conditions most fundamentally related to safety we will no longer have health professionals who are going to be able to care for us and our constituents in their time of need.”
The bill passed the House with a vote of 124-79.
