Hospitals Need Proof Their Violence Prevention Programs Are Actually Working

Healthcare workers spend their careers protecting patients and each other, often in moments when people are at their most vulnerable. Increasingly, they’re the ones who need protecting too.

The numbers make the case. Health care and social assistance workers account for nearly three-quarters of private-industry workplace violence cases (72.8 percent in 2021–2022, per BLS), and NIOSH identifies them as the group at greatest risk of violence resulting in days away from work. BLS puts their rate at 14.2 cases per 10,000 full-time workers, more than four times the 2.9 rate for private industry overall. In a 2026 survey, more than a quarter of nurses reported being physically assaulted at work in the prior year, and most never formally reported it.

Underreporting is its own finding worth sitting with. A separate 2025-26 survey of over 1,200 RNs found that only about 4 in 10 nurses said their employer gives them a clear way to report an incident, and fewer than 1 in 5 said they’re included in violence risk assessments at all. When people who experience violence don’t trust the reporting process, the data a health system relies on for staffing, training, and budget decisions is incomplete before it’s even collected.

Regulators are moving, if slowly. There is still no federal OSHA standard specifically for workplace violence prevention in healthcare, though a rule has been in development for years. The Joint Commission already requires accredited hospitals to have a workplace violence prevention program, and its National Performance Goals NPG 2a (Preventing Workplace Violence) and NPG 11 (Creating a Secure and Safe Physical Environment), effective January 1, 2026, put the emphasis on showing how that program operates. California’s SB 553 now requires a written plan for all employers in the state. Health systems will increasingly need to prove their prevention programs work, not just that they exist on paper.

Most of the Conversation Is About Alerts. Security Leaders Keep Asking About Proof.

Most published content on how to run a workplace violence prevention program centers on the moment something goes wrong: panic buttons, duress badges, mass notification. Those tools matter. In conversations with security leaders across hospital systems, though, a quieter problem comes up just as often. They struggle to show that the prevention work happening before an incident is actually happening at all.

That request tends to sound similar across health systems. A security leader inheriting a paper-based logging process wants it centralized so incident and patrol data is trustworthy enough to act on. A newer security director wants reporting built to hold the program accountable. A hospital wants workplace violence tracked as its own incident category, separate from general security logs, so trends in that specific risk are visible.

The common thread is a CSO who needs to walk into an Environment of Care meeting or a board review and show, with real data, where patrols are happening, where they aren’t, and whether the pattern is improving over time.

Accountability Data Changes Behavior Before an Incident Happens

Guard tours, GPS-verified patrols, and checkpoint scanning do more than document what happened after the fact. They create a record that someone is checking, and that record changes how the work gets done.

Andrew Smittie, Chief/Director at Lutheran Health Network, described this in practice. TrackTik data is shared monthly in Environment of Care meetings, with an annual report tracking security trends across the organization and supporting resourcing decisions. That’s a health system treating patrol and incident data as a standing input to compliance and safety governance, not an after-the-fact log pulled out only when something goes wrong.

Likith Kolla, a dispatcher at Lakeridge Health, pointed to the real-time version of the same capability. Being able to see guard location and activity is what matters most during an actual emergency, when leadership needs to know where coverage is without waiting for a radio call.

A facilities operations lead at a large enterprise health care company described the underlying mechanism plainly. Logging issues immediately, with that visibility reviewed by leadership, has made facility operators noticeably more diligent about performing their duties properly and on time. Visibility drives behavior. That’s a more defensible claim than saying a platform prevents violence directly, and it holds up under scrutiny.

What Proof Looks Like to a Board or a Surveyor

“We have a program” is a policy statement. “Here is what the program did this quarter” is evidence. The difference is a set of records that are captured as the work happens, kept consistently over time, and reported without anyone rebuilding them by hand the week before a review.

Evidence	What it demonstrates	Where it comes from in TrackTik
Patrol completion in high-risk units	Prevention work is happening where the risk is, on schedule	Checkpoint scans and GPS-verified tours
Workplace violence incidents by unit, shift and type	The organization knows where violence occurs and whether it is trending down	A dedicated workplace violence incident category with required fields
Response time from request to officer on unit	Staff can count on security when they call	Dispatch and Command Center time stamps
Corrective actions opened and closed	Incidents lead to change, not just documentation	Follow-up actions assigned and tracked as site tasks
Officer training and credential currency	The people responding are prepared and authorized	Training and certification records in people management

The common gap is not any one of these records; it is that they live in different places. Patrol data in one system, incident reports in another, training in HR, and corrective actions in someone’s inbox. When an incident crosses departments, the record has to cross with it, which is why how enterprise security teams report incidents to legal and compliance matters as much as how they report them to the board.

Six Metrics to Bring to the Environment of Care Meeting

A short, stable set of measures reported the same way every month builds more credibility than a long report that changes each time. These six cover prevention, response and follow-through:

1. Workplace violence incidents per 1,000 patient days, by unit. Normalizes for volume so units of different sizes can be compared fairly.
2. Patrol completion rate in designated high-risk areas. The emergency department, behavioral health and other units the risk assessment identifies, including overnight. See proving after-hours coverage in your highest-risk areas.
3. Median response time to staff requests for security. The number clinical staff feel most directly.
4. Share of incidents reported by staff versus discovered by security. A rising staff-reported share is a sign that reporting friction is coming down.
5. Corrective actions closed within target. Proof that incidents change something.
6. Officer training completion for de-escalation and the units they cover. Evidence the people on the floor are prepared.

Building a Defensible Record in 90 Days

Security leaders inheriting a paper-based or fragmented process often ask where to start. A practical sequence:

1. Days 1 to 30: separate and standardize. Create a dedicated workplace violence incident category with required fields for unit, shift, behavior type and injury. Move all security reporting onto officers’ phones so incidents are logged at the scene, not reconstructed later.
2. Days 31 to 60: verify coverage. Map checkpoints in the units your risk assessment flags, set tour frequencies by shift, and start measuring completion. Gaps will show up immediately; that is the point.
3. Days 61 to 90: report and close the loop. Bring the six metrics above to your first Environment of Care meeting, agree targets, and assign corrective actions with owners and dates. Share a summary with nursing leadership so staff can see that reports lead somewhere.

By the end of the quarter you have three months of consistent data, which is enough to show a trend and far more defensible than a single snapshot assembled for a survey.

Where TrackTik Fits in the Prevention Program

TrackTik supports the operational backbone underneath a violence prevention program. Verified patrols in the areas that carry the most risk, with officers reporting from the unit through the TrackTik security guard tour app. A workplace-violence-specific incident category instead of a general catch-all. Board-ready security reporting without anyone questioning whether the numbers can be trusted.

For a security leader trying to answer whether a prevention program is actually working, that’s the question that matters most. Not whether an alarm sounded, but whether there’s data to prove the work meant to prevent the incident in the first place is actually getting done.

To test your own program, start with the 2026 Hospital Workplace Violence Prevention Evidence Brief. For who owns each step when an incident crosses departments, use the Cross-Functional Incident Workbook for Hospitals. To see how the record is built and reported for a hospital, book a TrackTik demo.