Healthcare workers deserve to be safe.
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.
Many other states across the US have been engaged in the same conversation, with several enacting laws intended to increase penalties or reduce and prevent violence against healthcare workers.
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 within the next several months. Any agreement would then need approval from both chambers before being sent to the Governor.
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. The Senate version also includes amendments intended to reduce some of the potential harm arising from increased police involvement.
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, 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.
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.
The bills also fail to build in any meaningful involvement from current or former patients or advocacy groups.
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.
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.
In this spotlight series, we will examine what the available data actually tell us, what information is being withheld, whether increased punishment prevents violence, whose voices have been excluded, and what approaches could better protect everyone involved.
Protecting healthcare workers and protecting patients are not competing goals.
We don’t need to choose. We need solutions that protect us all.
Read more articles in this series…
Send a letter to the conference committee…
This article is a part of the Spotlight on the Workplace Violence bill.
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