At TeamHealth’s National Medical Leadership Conference, senior leaders came together to discuss the growing challenge of workplace violence in healthcare. Mike Wiechart, TeamHealth’s president and chief operating officer, moderated a discussion featuring Dr. Jim Horst, chief clinical officer for behavioral health; Dr. Robert Franz, president of TeamHealth’s West Group; and Theresa Tavernero, senior vice president of performance and innovation. The following article highlights key insights from their conversation and explores what healthcare organizations can do to create safer environments for clinicians and patients.
Confronting Workplace Violence in Healthcare
Workplace violence has become an increasingly urgent challenge for healthcare organizations, affecting not only the safety of clinicians and staff, but also workforce stability, patient care, and organizational culture.
Yet despite its prevalence, violence is still too often viewed as an unavoidable consequence of caring for patients during moments of crisis. For that reason, healthcare leaders have begun to increasingly voice that workplace violence is not inevitable and that addressing it requires coordinated action across the organization.
Pervasive, Predictable, and Preventable
For Dr. Jim Horst, decades of experience caring for patients with acute psychiatric needs offer important lessons for healthcare leaders on this topic.
“The research was very clear,” Horst said. “There are three main characteristics when it comes to workplace violence: it’s pervasive, it’s predictable, and it’s preventable.”
Behavioral health settings have long grappled with aggression and assault, but Horst noted that many of the warning signs associated with violence can be recognized well before an incident occurs. Staffing shortages, environmental chaos, and escalating patient behaviors often contribute to an atmosphere where violence becomes more likely.
Prevention, he said, begins with culture.
“We always talk about the physical part — I got hit, I got spit on— but the verbal is much higher,” Horst observed. Recognizing verbal threats, intimidation, and harassment as workplace violence is an important step toward creating environments where clinicians feel empowered to report incidents and seek support.
Horst also emphasized the importance of providing that support after an incident occurs. Organizations that foster cultures where clinicians feel comfortable discussing their experiences and seeking help are better positioned to mitigate the lasting emotional effects of workplace violence. As he noted during the discussion, lasting trauma can extend beyond the individual clinician, affecting families, communities, and teams.
Training for a Complex Challenge
Theresa Tavernero characterized workplace violence as “a beast of a problem” because responsibility for prevention is often fragmented across departments and disciplines.
“Security trains differently. The police train differently. Nurses train differently. Physicians never get training at all,” she said.
Tavernero noted that healthcare organizations frequently lack reliable data because incidents are inconsistently reported and definitions vary from one system to another. She advocated for more intentional approaches that include standardized reporting, multidisciplinary training, routine drills, coordinated response protocols, and structured debriefings following incidents.
“Training right now is disparate,” she said. “It’s varied, and I think it’s inadequate because it’s such a beastly problem.”
She also highlighted the broader organizational implications of workplace violence. Beyond the immediate impact on those directly involved, violence contributes to emotional distress, absenteeism, turnover, and recruitment challenges.
Healthcare organizations are already struggling to recruit and retain clinicians, and many are leaving the profession because of the trauma associated with workplace violence. Addressing these incidents is therefore not only a safety imperative, but also an important strategy for supporting clinician well-being and sustaining the healthcare workforce.
Creating a Culture of Safety
Dr. Robert Franz connected workplace violence to the broader issue of clinician well-being. Drawing on his experiences as a paramedic, police officer, emergency physician, and physician executive, Franz challenged traditional discussions around burnout.
“This is not burnout,” he said.
Franz described healthcare workers as being repeatedly exposed to emotionally hazardous environments, arguing that organizations must do more than ask clinicians to become more resilient. They must also create environments that better protect them from cumulative trauma.
Workplace violence compounds those challenges because it undermines the sense of safety clinicians need to care effectively for patients.
“Workplace violence is like a home invasion,” Franz said. “We have to have safety and security to care. We can’t have an emotional connection with somebody and care about them if you don’t feel safe and secure in the care setting.”
Panelists agreed that healthcare organizations already possess many of the tools needed to make meaningful progress. Health systems routinely establish cultures of quality, measure outcomes, conduct root cause analyses, and share best practices. Workplace violence deserves the same level of attention and accountability.
As Franz observed, “We just have to decide this matters to us.”
Protecting clinicians from violence cannot rest solely on frontline caregivers, security teams, or behavioral health specialists. It requires engagement from health systems, clinical partners, law enforcement agencies, regulators, and policymakers alike. By fostering cultures that encourage reporting, investing in coordinated training, and strengthening partnerships across organizations and communities, healthcare leaders can help ensure that violence is no longer accepted as simply part of the job.
Culture, training, and protocols alone will not eliminate workplace violence, but they provide a foundation for organizations committed to creating safer environments for those who deliver care and the patients who depend on them.
