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“Violence is just part of the job. Every nurse and health care worker experiences it at some point.”

Sentiments like this echo across American hospitals and health care facilities, capturing a disturbing and growing reality. Though Americans think of nursing as the most trusted profession, we often fail to see that it’s also one of the most dangerous.

An alarming 8 in 10 nurses face violence at work. As a result, health care workers are more than four times as likely to be injured by workplace violence than workers in all other industries combined.

Despite these staggering numbers, the full extent of this epidemic may not be completely understood because nurses and other health care workers are believed to chronically underreport violent encounters. The American Nurses Association estimates that only 20% to 60% of incidents are accounted for. Additionally, there is no agreed-upon definition for workplace violence or clear way of tracking it on a national level.

As a practicing bedside nurse, I have experienced my fair share of workplace violence. As a professor of nursing, my research shows that violence has become a normalized but underreported part of working in health care and that it affects the care patients receive in pervasive ways.

Nurses and health care staff work with people during incredibly stressful moments in their lives. Sometimes patients are experiencing medical conditions that may cause them to act out or be confused, such as dementia, delirium, psychosis or postoperative reactions to anesthesia.

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