Measuring Healthcare Workers' Workplace Violence Exposure Over Time Using Workers' Compensation Claims

Workplace violence towards healthcare workers impacts workforce stability and patient care delivery. California passed a workplace violence prevention standard, phased in during 2017-2018, requiring enhanced tracking and training in healthcare workplaces. Workers' compensation claims provide a tool to track frequency of violence over time.

This descriptive study synthesizes data from the California Workers' Compensation Information System (WCIS) covering all healthcare workplaces in the state. Claims included were filed from 2013 to 2021. We tabulated the annual rate of workplace violence-related claims, types of workplaces with high rates of claims, and types of injuries caused by violence.

We identified 46,762 violence-related workers' compensation claims over the study period from a total of 418,278 total claims (11%). The highest rate of violence-related claims was in 2019 (5.6 claims per 1000 healthcare workers). Residential care facilities for children reported 31% of their total claims as violence-related, and psychiatric and substance-use hospitals reported 35% of their total claims as violence-related. Most healthcare industry claims were from individuals working in hospitals, and employees in these workplaces reported between 11% and 13% of total claims as violence-related.

Workers' compensation claims provide an important description of workplace violence exposure among healthcare workers, and the relative stability of measurement makes it a useful way to track the impact of mitigation strategies over time. It would be valuable for workers' compensation claims managers to capture an assessment of whether an incident involved violence to facilitate appropriate connection to needed resources, including psychological support, for an injured worker.