Hospitals have spent billions of dollars making workplace violence easier to count and no easier to survive. For decades, it has been treated as an occupational hazard, something clinical staff are expected to absorb as part of the job. That narrative is finally shifting as incidents climb and a growing number of clinicians reconsider whether they can stay in the profession at all.
Technologies like real-time location systems (RTLS), weapons detection, surveillance cameras, panic buttons, de-escalation training, and security personnel have all been added to the budget. And yet a nurse who encounters a violent patient today has almost the exact same experience as a nurse from ten, twenty, or thirty years ago. They call a code for help, typically a Code Gray (or code “Hula Hoop” if you are watching The Pitt), and security responds. Later, someone files an incident report. But the report is paperwork, not prevention. Nothing changes. Everyone simply waits for it to happen again.
That’s not because health systems haven’t cared enough to fix it. It’s because most of that spending has gone toward two things: quantifying and categorizing incident volume after the fact, and teaching healthcare workers to handle assault and aggression the way security or law enforcement professionals would, rather than the way clinicians are actually equipped to.
Measurement matters. You can’t improve what you don’t track, and that data has been genuinely useful for understanding the scope of the problem. In environments where 76% of healthcare workers think about their personal safety every day, 85% have experienced a workplace violence incident during their careers, and 25% encounter incidents weekly or daily, there’s no shortage of proof that this is a crisis. What’s missing is how to bring these numbers down.
The industry has been asking the wrong question. Instead of asking how to respond to violence, health systems need to start asking how to prevent it from reaching that point at all.
Earlier intervention in the lifecycle of an incident
Preventing violence requires stopping an event before it starts. That’s the core of a pre-escalation mindset: the recognition that safety work doesn’t begin when a situation turns dangerous; it begins the moment early warning signs appear. One of the biggest misconceptions in healthcare safety is that violence begins at the moment of physical or verbal confrontation. In reality, it starts much earlier, during what leaders increasingly call the “simmer stage.” This is the moment a patient or visitor first shows signs of agitation. The signs can be subtle, such as a shift in body language or stepping into a clinician’s personal space, but they signal that a situation is already starting to destabilize.
Traditional safety systems only activate once a situation has escalated into a physical confrontation or reportable event. By then, the window for prevention has closed.
I like to use a simple analogy: if you’re in a movie theater, by the time the theater is on fire, things are already out of control. But if you can tell somebody the moment you smell smoke, that’s an opportunity to avert the fire altogether. The best way to win a conflict is to avoid it in the first place, and that only happens if the technology is built to catch the smoke, not just the fire. Pre-escalation isn’t a feature. It’s a different way of thinking about what safety systems are actually for.
The protection gap in health system settings
The issue can be categorized in many ways: as a measurement problem, a training problem, or a protection gap. Roughly 40% of healthcare staff are still unfamiliar with the safety protocols on their own campuses, and the systems meant to protect them are just as fragmented, relying on fixed panic buttons, siloed security teams, manual reporting, and standalone surveillance tools that can’t communicate with one another.
Micah Deriso, Global Head of Partnerships at Verkada, put it simply: “More technology does not automatically mean more safety.” In the one moment that matters most, fragmented tools force a frightened clinician to become a systems integrator, introducing delays when seconds can mean the difference between containment and injury. Hospitals lose the ability to see the full timeline of an incident when the underlying infrastructure is disjointed, and you cannot intervene early enough to prevent escalation without that visibility.
Layer on training models built around managing an aggressor rather than avoiding a confrontation, and it becomes clear why outcomes haven’t matched the investment. The tools count and categorize, and the training prepares people to respond. But there isn’t anything inherent in these tools that is built to help a clinician avoid the moment altogether.
The case for unified safety infrastructure
The question isn’t whether hospitals need safety technology. They do. But there’s no single silver bullet solution that will prevent violence. Hospitals need technologies designed to work together, aimed at the moment before escalation, not the moment after.
Verkada’s cloud-based physical security platform combines video, access control, and environmental monitoring into one system, giving organizations visibility across large, complex campuses. Paired with Canopy’s Connected Safety Platform, that visibility becomes actionable. A clinician can discreetly activate a Canopy wearable duress button the moment they feel uncomfortable, before there’s been any escalation. That alert reaches nearby colleagues and security personnel with precise location information, while Verkada’s video platform automatically surfaces live camera views of the area.
That combination changes two things at once. First, it turns a 1:1 encounter into a 1:few situation almost instantly, and shifting that dynamic is often enough to lower the agitation before anything happens. Those are the near misses that bend the curve over time, not because the incident was handled well, but because it never became an incident at all. Second, it gives responders the context to act instead of guessing, and gives workplace violence prevention committees a complete record to run real post-incident reviews instead of piecing one together from three disconnected systems.
That’s a fundamentally different relationship between staff and their safety infrastructure. Instead of safety being something that happens to them after the fact, it becomes something they actively participate in from the start.
“Every single one of those cameras is basically a security guard watching,” Deriso notes. “When you press a button, all eyes are on you. It may be a non-incident. But now you have the intelligence to know how to respond.” That context is what turns safety from a response function into an actual prevention strategy.
Safety’s influence on staff, culture, and financial performance
Modern safety strategies have to extend beyond physical protection to account for psychological safety. When systems are fragmented or hard to use, reporting declines and silence grows. When staff don’t see action taken on their concerns, they stop raising them. Every unreported incident is the system working exactly as designed, teaching people that speaking up is pointless, and that silence creates blind spots that hide the true scope of the risk an organization is carrying.
Closing that gap from “violence is part of the job” to “violence is avoidable when we don’t leave providers to handle it alone” takes a real culture shift, not just better tools. That means encouraging frontline staff to signal early, even when a situation doesn’t look obviously dangerous yet. It means training peers to recognize the simmer stage and step in before it escalates. And it means making sure security teams are prepared to support that response, not just take it over.
That cultural shift has a direct financial consequence. Safety has become a leading indicator of retention. Canopy’s most recent safety report found that 85% of healthcare workers now prioritize safety when choosing an employer. When safety isn’t a visible operational priority, staff notice, and the message it sends is that their well-being isn’t leadership’s concern.
Replacing a single nurse can cost an average of $64,500, and with turnover rates between 18% and 22% across many organizations, the cumulative strain is substantial. The American Hospital Association estimates workplace violence costs the industry more than $18 billion annually, with nearly 80% of that tied to post-incident care and recovery, not prevention.
Organizations that invest in proactive safety infrastructure are beginning to see measurable improvements on both sides of that equation. At WellSpan Health, activating Canopy’s connected technology was associated with a 66% reduction in DART (Days Away, Restricted, or Transferred) injuries within a single year. When staff feel protected and supported, the dynamic shifts. They’re more likely to stay, more likely to report, and more likely to help build a safer environment for the people around them. Organizations seeing gains like these are the ones treating safety as operational infrastructure, not a compliance expense.
Differentiating safety beyond security
Healthcare hasn’t had a technology shortage. It had a coordination and allocation problem, spending heavily on counting incidents and managing aggressors, and comparatively little on helping staff avoid the moment altogether. Until safety systems can recognize risk early and respond as one, hospitals will keep investing in security without changing the experience of the people they’re trying to protect.
The industry has proven it can measure this crisis to the decimal point. The open question is whether it is willing to spend on preventing it, or whether counting was always the point. The shift from reactive to pre-escalation isn’t just operational; it’s cultural. It asks staff to trust that acting early is the right call, and it asks organizations to build systems that reward them for doing so. When staff feel safe, they show up better for their patients. That is why we are all here.
