Continuing Our Efforts to Address Violence
Every day, the women and men of America’s hospitals and health systems show up for work to deliver healing and hope for patients, comfort families and strengthen communities.
They do this in so many ways, as hospitals and health systems are the first places people turn to in times of emergency, disaster and, sadly, acts of violence. Violence is one of the nation’s major public health and safety issues, both in our communities and workplaces.
We see too many instances of targeted violence in health care settings — where health care professionals, patients and health care facilities are specifically singled out as targets. Such acts of violence can take many forms, including physical assaults, verbal threats or other attacks.
In 2016, the AHA launched its Hospitals Against Violence initiative to address the growing public health threat of community and workplace violence. Under the current leadership of Hospitals Against Violence Committee Chair Debra Albert, an AHA board member and NYU Langone Health senior vice president for patient care services and chief nursing officer, the effort continues to shine a light on how hospitals and health systems are working to heal victims of violence as well as their communities, prevent further acts of violence, and address violence in the workplace. The AHA, working with partner organizations, has developed and shared many resources for hospitals to use to address community and workplace violence.
More recently, we established an ongoing relationship with the FBI to discuss critical issues that affect hospitals and health systems, including fortifying our defenses against cyber threats.
As an outgrowth of this relationship with the FBI and our work to mitigate violence against hospitals and health care teams, we partnered with the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit-1 and their Behavioral Threat Assessment Center to create a series of resources for hospitals and health systems focused on behavioral threat assessment and management (BTAM).
This month we released a joint AHA-FBI guide that provides practical, evidence-based strategies to strengthen threat management activities in health care facilities and offers direction on how to involve local law enforcement and the FBI into hospital-based efforts. It also includes information on critical training and education for health care team members so that they are equipped to recognize the warning signs and know how best to respond.
In addition, the resource highlights examples from AHA members Scripps Health, Ascension, Duke Raleigh Hospital and the University of Virginia Medical Center about how they have created and maintained BTAM teams, established partnerships with law enforcement and other community partners, and educated the workforce on identifying targeted violence threats. TA resource compendium with content from researchers, security professionals and FBI agents is provided for those wanting a deeper understanding of how hospitals and health systems can use BTAM to prevent targeted violence.
While we continue to provide resources to the field, we also are working with Congress to enact the Save Healthcare Workers Act (H.R. 3178/S. 1600) — bipartisan, bicameral legislation that would make it a federal crime to assault hospital workers, similar to current federal law protecting airline and airport workers.
Violence has no place in our communities or in our health care settings. We must keep working together to end the cycle of violence and ensure that our nation’s caregivers can focus on what they do best — caring for patients and advancing health in our communities.