What the New House Bill on Workplace Violence Prevention Would Mean for Health Care Workers

What the New House Bill on Workplace Violence Prevention Would Mean for Health Care Workers

With 251 voting for, versus 158 voting against, the U.S. House of Representatives passed HR 1309, the "Workplace Violence Prevention for Health Care and Social Service Workers Act" Friday, sending the bill to the Senate for a second vote.

The bill's support largely reflected party lines in the Democrat-controlled House, though 32 Republicans did reach across the aisle to support the bill, which was authored by Connecticut Democrat Rep. Joe Courtney.

According the legitimate summary: "This invoice requires the Department of Labor to deal with administrative center violence within the fitness care and social carrier sectors. Specifically, Labor should promulgate an occupational safety and fitness wellknown that requires sure employers within the health care and social provider sectors ... To broaden and implement a comprehensive plan for protective health care employees, social carrier workers, and different employees from place of job violence."

If signed into the regulation, the invoice might provide employers twelve months to develop a provisional plan for shielding health care employees, and 42 months to expand and put into effect a final plan for investigating incidents of violence, teaching group of workers on chance control, meeting precise recording necessities, and developing a secure area for health care people to file acts of violence or threats.

The measure accompanied rising attention to the dangers many health specialists face just by using displaying up at work. Over 75 percentage of the 25,000 place of work attacks pronounced annually within the United States took place in hospitals and other health care and social services settings, in line with information from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). The average fitness care worker turned into 20 percentage much more likely to revel in violence at work than the common employee, in keeping with the National Crime Victimization Survey, whilst the American Nurses Association suggested that 1 in 4 nurses had been bodily assaulted by a patient or a patient's member of the family.

The American Journal of Managed Care published an editorial in May titled "Violence Against Healthcare Workers: A Rising Epidemic," wherein a couple of health care employees shared their battle testimonies of threats from patients and violent feuds that spilled over into emergency rooms.

"Workplace violence in opposition to nurses has been going on for many years," Michelle Mahon, the nursing exercise representative for National Nurses United instructed the journal. "It makes experience due to the fact the fitness care putting and the [emergency department] in particular is a very emotionally risky experience for people. Patients are at their worst, they're feeling terrible, they are ill, they're frightened and prone. Their circle of relatives contributors also are frightened and harassed out, and people lash out. We see psychiatric issues because of loss of behavioral fitness, gang violence, and gun violence."

Despite its early success, H.R. 1309 is not going to prevail within the Republican-managed Senate.

"All of us here today, regardless of our political beliefs, appreciate the hard work and empathy that health care workers and community caregivers demonstrate every single day on the job," GOP Rep. Virginia Foxx of North Carolina said of the bill's passage, before calling the resolution "rushed and ill-conceived."

The upper chamber referred the bill to the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions following the Friday vote.