Hospitals have spent the last several years building out fall prevention and patient safety monitoring programs — risk scores, ambient sensors, virtual sitting, automated alerts. Almost none of that investment covers the safety of the people doing the monitoring.
The numbers say it should. A 2025 National Nurses United survey found that 84.8% of nurses experienced some form of workplace violence in the past year, and 36.4% of RNs said violence on their unit had gotten worse over that same period — with only 6.8% reporting an improvement. In emergency departments specifically, data from the American College of Emergency Physicians, promoted through the Emergency Nurses Association's "No Silence on ED Violence" campaign, puts the number even higher: roughly 70% of emergency nurses report having been physically assaulted at work.
Workplace violence in healthcare refers to physical assault, verbal abuse, or threatening behavior directed at clinical staff by patients, visitors, or family members during care delivery. It's not a fringe risk. The Joint Commission has elevated workplace violence prevention to a National Performance Goal as part of its 2026 National Performance Goals framework, requiring accredited hospitals to maintain a documented, systematic prevention program — not a policy that sits in a binder until survey week.
Most patient safety technology wasn't built with this problem in mind. Here's why that gap exists, and what closing it actually looks like.
Workplace violence against nurses is common, and by most current measures, getting worse — not a rare or isolated event.
The scale is worth sitting with:
This isn't only a safety statistic — it's a retention one. A nurse who doesn't feel physically safe at work leaves, and replacing an experienced RN costs a hospital far more than any monitoring technology on the market.
The Joint Commission now requires hospitals to maintain a documented, systematic workplace violence prevention program, including staff training and ongoing review, rather than a static policy.
This is part of the broader shift from National Patient Safety Goals to National Performance Goals that took effect in January 2026 — a move from "do you have a policy" to "can you show it's working," which we've covered in detail in our earlier post on the 2026 National Performance Goals framework. Workplace violence prevention now sits inside that same outcomes-based expectation: documented incidents, documented training, and a program surveyors can actually evaluate.
Most fall prevention and virtual sitting platforms were purpose-built to watch for one specific thing — a patient getting out of bed unassisted — not to recognize escalating or aggressive behavior.
That narrow design isn't a flaw, exactly; it's just a different problem than the one workplace violence presents. Meanwhile, the technology that is built for aggression and threat detection — facility-wide security AI platforms — typically operates entirely separately from clinical patient monitoring. Security operations manages one system. Nursing manages another. The two rarely talk to each other, which means a hospital ends up with two vendor relationships covering two halves of the same patient room.
The result is a genuine gap: very few platforms built for fall and pressure injury monitoring also cover violent or escalating patient behavior from the same sensor already sitting in the room.
Violent or escalating patient behavior alerting is a native VSTOne use case, running on the same LiDAR sensor already monitoring fall and pressure injury risk — not a separate camera system or a second vendor relationship.
When a patient is flagged as potentially violent in the EHR, VSTOne notifies staff entering the room through a code phrase for added awareness, and alerts other staff members if that patient leaves their bed or chair while a nurse is present in the room. Froedtert ThedaCare Health, which has reported a 4.5x ROI using VSTOne, is one of several health systems running the platform's broader safety feature set — fall prevention, pressure injury monitoring, and violent-patient alerting — from the same device.
The point isn't that any single sensor solves workplace violence. It's that the technology already in the room for patient safety doesn't have to ignore staff safety entirely.
Q: How common is workplace violence against nurses?
A: It's common and by most measures increasing. A 2025 National Nurses United survey found 84.8% of nurses experienced some form of workplace violence in the past year, and 36.4% of RNs said violence on their unit had gotten worse over that period.
Q: What does the Joint Commission require hospitals to do about workplace violence?
A: The Joint Commission requires accredited hospitals to maintain a documented, systematic workplace violence prevention program — including staff training and ongoing review — as part of its National Performance Goals framework, effective January 2026.
Q: Can patient monitoring technology help prevent violence against hospital staff?
A: Some platforms can. Most fall prevention and virtual sitting technology isn't built to recognize escalating or aggressive behavior, but a smaller number of ambient monitoring platforms, including VirtuSense's VSTOne, include violent or escalating patient behavior alerting as part of the same sensor used for fall and pressure injury monitoring.
Q: What's the difference between security AI and clinical monitoring for violent patient behavior?
A: Facility security AI platforms are typically built for weapons or aggression detection across an entire building and are managed by security operations, separate from clinical workflows. Clinical ambient monitoring platforms that include violent-patient alerting, like VSTOne, integrate that alert directly into the same room-level sensor and nursing workflow already used for fall and pressure injury monitoring.
Hospitals have built real, measurable fall and pressure injury prevention programs over the past several years. Nurse safety has largely sat outside that investment, even as the data shows the risk rising and the Joint Commission now treats it as a documented accreditation requirement rather than a background concern. Closing that gap doesn't necessarily mean a new vendor relationship — for a growing number of health systems, it means asking whether the sensor already in the room can cover this too.
See how VSTOne covers violent-patient alerting alongside fall and pressure injury monitoring. Request a demo →
For a broader look at everything one ambient AI sensor can cover, see our related post, 7 Hospital Safety Problems Ambient AI Solves (2026).