Healthcare workers deserve to be safe, but not at the expense of patients and others receiving services.

Yet, current legislation on workplace safety that is poised to become law would almost inevitably cause harm to people in the 'patient' role while potentially providing minimal to no benefit to healthcare workers.

No one should go to work expecting to be threatened, injured, or unsupported when harm occurs.

This is what the Massachusetts Nurses Association (MNA), the Massachusetts Health & Hospital Association (MHA), healthcare workers and their allies have been arguing for years as they have attempted to pass related legislation. We agree.

However, it gets complicated from there.

What’s Going on in Massachusetts Right Now?

In July 2026, the Senate joined the House in moving forward a bill aimed at reducing violence against healthcare workers.

H.4767/S.3184, An Act requiring health care employers to develop and implement programs to prevent workplace violence, now sits in a legislative conference committee, where three senators—Cindy Friedman, Joan Lovely and Kelly Dooner—and three representatives—Michael Day, Brandy Fluker-Reid and Hannah Kane—will determine what the final bill should look like.

The conference committee has begun meeting and could produce a compromise version at any point between now and the end of the current legislative session in early January 2027.

Unfortunately, a lot of misinformation and misrepresented statistics are being circulated to push the bill through without further amendments.

The Specifics of What Concerns Us

As things currently stand, the House version includes a provision that would make assault on a healthcare worker a felony. The Senate replaced that provision with a warrantless-arrest provision allowing police to make an arrest before court involvement and even when they did not directly witness what happened. That approach resembles a longstanding exception allowing warrantless arrests in certain domestic-violence situations.

This is a very serious issue. Many advocates oppose provisions that would increase police involvement in ways likely to have disparate impacts on people with psychiatric histories and other disabilities, as well as Black and Brown, transgender and other marginalized communities.

In particular, if the House felony version remains intact, relatively minor conduct could potentially be prosecuted as a felony—including conduct arising when someone attempts to defend themself against forced treatment. A felony conviction arising from a single incident could have lifelong consequences, creating substantial barriers to employment, education, immigration status and access to housing—including public or subsidized housing.

And while the Senate 'warrantless arrest' provision is significantly better, it still leaves room for relatively minor incidents or situations where someone is acting out of a trauma response to involve the police. This could be true even in group living environments that serve as someone's private home.

Both versions also contain provisions that could facilitate the collection and sharing of information identifying people as potential safety threats, including information-sharing involving healthcare facilities, law enforcement and other government agencies. These provisions raise serious concerns about surveillance, stigmatization, privacy and due process.

Additionally, the bills fail to build in any meaningful involvement from current or former patients or advocacy groups and neither version recognizes the ways in which facility and system conditions also lead to harm for patients or sometimes pit healthcare workers and patients against one another.

These oversights are consistent with the sort of conditions that have actually led to increases in risk of aggression in a variety of facilities.

Patients—including people experiencing psychiatric distress—also deserve dignity, meaningful choice, and care that does not unnecessarily expose them to force, abuse, neglect, restraint, arrest or prosecution.

We believe we don’t need to choose between healthcare workers and patients.

Too often, the conversation about violence in healthcare settings positions workers and patients as opposing groups: healthcare workers are people who need protection, while patients—particularly psychiatric patients—are treated as the danger. This framing overlooks the conditions in which harmful encounters occur, including understaffing, overcrowding, inadequate training, long waits, forced treatment, racial inequity, ableism, and the removal of patients’ power and choice.

When situations escalate, workers may be frightened or injured. Patients may be restrained, abused, neglected, traumatized, arrested or criminalized. Sometimes both are harmed, while the systems that created the conditions escape meaningful scrutiny.

Protecting healthcare workers and protecting patients are not competing goals.

We don’t need to choose. We need solutions that protect us all.

For more information on this issue, check out these articles:

• Is the public being presented with distorted data?
• What if we counted harm to disabled people in the same way?
• What about financial abuse?
• More punishment does not equal more safety
• Violence starts before the facility begins counting
• The 'dangerous patient' list provision
• Workplace violence legislation & marginalized communities
• What is the right next step for Massachusetts?