Researchers Predict Workplace Violence to Increase for Certain Healthcare Workers by 2032
Recent research from a major think tank estimates that reported workplace injuries will increase by almost 1 percent by 2032, driven by workplace violence and potentially costing employers billions of dollars.
In 2023, 5,283 people were fatally injured at work in the United States, a 3.7 percent decrease from the 5,486 fatal injuries reported at work in 2022, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data released Thursday morning. There were also 1,172,800 nonfatal injuries and illnesses that affected U.S. workers in 2023, down from the 1,483,400 reported in 2022 and its estimated 75 million lost workdays.
Lost productivity in 2022 cost an estimated total of $167 billion, which included lost wages ($50.7 billion), administrative costs ($54 billion), and medical costs ($37.6 billion), according to the Brookings Institution’s report, Workplace injuries in a changing labor market, which was published on 5 December.
Occupational injuries can vary greatly depending on the job role and industry—from carpal tunnel syndrome and other musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) caused by repetitive tasks to falls or slips and electrical injuries. Regardless, any injury or illness linked to the workplace could cause an employee to miss work time.
The National Safety Council also looked at data from the BLS and found that the most frequently cited workplace safety standards included falls, respiratory illnesses, hazardous energy (such as exposure to electricity or an injury sustained while running machinery), eye and face injuries, caught in running equipment, and powered vehicles like forklifts, order pickers, or platform trucks.
The council also found that the top fatality events besides the above citations involved transportation incidents (almost 2,100 deaths), workplace violence (865 fatalities), and overexertion and bodily reaction (more than 1 million days away, restricted, or transferred).
The impacts of occupational injuries can be seen beyond financial and productivity statistics. They’re often linked to negative mental health outcomes, with an injured employee more likely to exhibit symptoms of severe psychological distress, such as anxiety or depression. Higher incidences of workplace injury have also been associated with an increase in substance abuse.
In the future, researchers expect that the changing U.S. economy will increase the incidence of workplace injuries, including a projected 4 percent increase in violent injuries across the entire U.S. workforce. Overall employment is predicted to add an estimated 4.7 million jobs by 2033, and future growth will likely occur in the healthcare and computer sectors.
“Home health aides are the job with the largest projected increase in employment and will be the largest occupation in the economy by 2032,” according to the Brookings report.
Home health aides fall under the larger umbrella of direct care workers, which also includes personal care aides, nursing assistants, orderlies, and psychiatric aides. Injuries or illnesses that affect people in these roles can include back strains and exposure to infectious diseases, such as COVID-19, notes Richard G. Frank, one of the authors of the report and director for Brookings’s Center on Health Policy.
“And then there’s workplace violence,” Frank says. “It turns out that being a psychiatric aide or a nursing home aide or a home healthcare aide has a lot of risk of violence.”
The report determined that if no new actions are taken to curb workplace injuries, that direct care workers will experience 3,199 more violent injuries annually in 2032 compared to 2022.
“We predict that in 2032, there will be 7,155 more violent occupational injuries annually than there were in 2022,” researchers wrote.
The report found that a majority of direct care workers are women (86.2 percent) and people of color (62.5 percent).
“They are also low-paid, with a median salary of approximately $31,000 and only 40.3 percent of direct care workers report receiving employer-sponsored health insurance through their own or a family member’s job,” the report said.
Female-dominated jobs—including direct care, educational instruction, library occupations, and health technologists and technicians—experience more intentional violence than male-dominated occupations.
The data also indicated that jobs roles held by Black employees are more likely to experience both intentional and unintentional injuries.
“Jobs with higher shares of Black workers experience 70 percent more intentional violence and 140 percent more unintentional violence than occupations with fewer Black workers,” the report said.
Occupations with more Black employees include law enforcement, supervisors of protective service workers, educational instruction and library occupations, and direct care workers.
Staffing shortages are a pain point for employers of direct care workers, as women have increasingly participated in the formal labor force. Meanwhile, the U.S. population is aging—between 2010 and 2020 the number of adults aged 65 or older increased by 38 percent (15.2 million people).
“In addition, the past decades have seen a shift from nursing homes towards home- and community-based care for older adults, compounding the need for home health aides and other community-based direct care workers,” the report said.
“In order to keep the enterprises running, the staff is just being asked to do more,” Frank says. “For example, in nursing homes where there’s less supervision, if there is a patient who is a little out of control, there’s fewer people to take care of that. And the risk of injury goes up.”
There are measures employers can take to reduce the risk of workplace injuries. One is to simply increase staff. Another option is to update business practices to improve safety protocols, improve physical work environments, and implement injury prevention programs.
Organizations and employers can also rely on technology to provide support, such as using surveillance systems, according to Frank. Going back to direct care workers, he points to how being able to monitor a patient before staff interacts with him or her can help make a workplace safer.
