Imagine it’s 2026.

What might an anthropologist conclude about workplace violence in healthcare in 2026?

On June 2, 2025, we published the first entry in the OPTICS for Healthcare Newsroom.

It was a research report commissioned by the American Hospital Association and conducted by the University of Washington's Harborview Injury Prevention and Research Center. The assignment was straightforward: estimate the financial costs and other impacts to hospitals from all types of violence, abuse, and threatening behavior within their facilities and communities.

The finding: $18.27 billion. For hospitals alone. In a single year.

It felt like the right place to start. A year later, I think it was exactly the right place to start — because that number, as large as it is, turned out to be just the beginning of what we would spend the next twelve months documenting.

A Year by the Numbers.

Since that first entry, the OPTICS Newsroom has tracked 86 articles, research reports, and news stories. The sources span the Associated Press, Reuters, Bloomberg, and the New York Times. They include the American Nurses Association, the American Hospital Association, the Department of Labor, the American College of Emergency Physicians, the Joint Commission, and the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses. They come from academic medical centers, specialty legal publications, local television stations in more than 20 states, and outlets in Canada and the United Kingdom.

The breadth of the coverage is itself a data point. This is not a niche story. It is not confined to one region, one type of facility, or one professional group. Every corner of the healthcare system has been touched by it. Every week, someone is writing about it. Someone is legislating around it. Someone is going on strike because of it. Someone is being hurt by it.

When we look at what those 86 stories actually covered, a clear picture emerges.

The largest category is legislative and regulatory action — roughly 20 stories tracking new laws, enforcement actions, and federal oversight activity. Utah, New York, Washington, Virginia, California, Ohio. The DOL's OIG added healthcare workplace violence to its federal audit workplan. Congress has been debating solutions — sometimes inconclusively, but with increasing urgency. WHO and OSHA have each issued new frameworks. The legal publication National Law Review alone contributed five separate pieces. Compliance, as it turns out, is not a destination. It is a moving target, and it has been moving fast.

Close behind is a category we might simply call: what is actually happening to people. Eighteen stories of specific incidents and institutional failures. A nurse strangled at an Ohio State University medical facility. A hospital security officer in New York beaten so severely he was placed on life support. More than 100 violent attacks documented by nurses picketing in Washington state. A nurse at TriStar Summit Medical Center speaking out after a string of assaults. Vigils at UPMC Altoona. A candlelight vigil outside Brooklyn Methodist Hospital. Safety concerns at San Francisco General that staff say were repeatedly ignored. These are not statistics. They are people, named or unnamed, whose lives were changed on a shift that was supposed to be ordinary.

Sixteen stories tracked the workforce consequences: nurses and healthcare workers leaving in numbers that should alarm every health system leader in the country. Over half of U.S. healthcare workers saying they plan to switch jobs within a year. One in four considering leaving the industry entirely. Strikes at Montefiore, Mount Sinai, New York-Presbyterian, Kingston, and hospitals in Maine and Winnipeg. Reuters. Bloomberg. The AP. The workforce is not being dramatic. It is being honest.

A dozen research and survey entries — from Medscape, ASIS, Penn LDI, the AACN, and others — documented the data behind the crisis. Eighty-one percent of nurses reporting they have experienced workplace violence. Workplace assaults up 62 percent since 2011. More than 70 percent of private-industry assault claims concentrated in healthcare. The data infrastructure around this problem is growing, which is both a sign of increased seriousness and a reminder that data without action does not move the needle.

Ten stories covered organizational and leadership responses — the ones worth paying attention to because they show what is possible. Southcoast Health hired its first police chief. Independence Health System built new safety infrastructure. Kentucky hospitals launched a public awareness campaign. Simulation training programs are emerging as serious prevention tools. And WellSpan Health, which we reported on just two days ago, achieved a 66 percent reduction in workplace violence injuries following a sustained, multi-layered safety investment across nine hospitals. That story — that one — is the one we want to see more of.

The remaining entries covered legal liability, contextual forces, and adjacent topics: the social conditions that enter hospitals through the people seeking care, the role of AI and misinformation in altering patient behavior, the way domestic violence follows workers into the workplace, and the broader economic strains on the healthcare workforce. These pieces remind us that workplace violence does not begin at the hospital entrance. It arrives with everything else.

Now Imagine It Is 2226.

An anthropologist — a scholar of early 21st-century institutional life — has come across this archive. Eighty-six documents. One year's worth of coverage from a platform called OPTICS for Healthcare. It is the only record she has of what life was like in American healthcare in 2026.

What would she conclude?

She would see a society in which the people responsible for healing others were routinely hurt in the course of doing so. She would see that the problem was extensively documented — described from every angle, by every type of institution — and that documentation appeared to far outpace action. She would see governments beginning to legislate. Courts beginning to rule. Nurses beginning to strike. 

She would notice that the dominant tone of the archive is not shock. It is fatigue. The people writing and speaking in these documents do not sound surprised. They sound exhausted by a pattern they have recognized for years and are not yet certain they can change.

She would look at the workforce numbers — half the workforce planning to leave, a quarter considering leaving the profession — and she would recognize the shape of a system under serious structural strain. She would look at the legal and regulatory activity and see a government apparatus beginning, slowly, to treat this as a regulated problem rather than an acceptable occupational condition.

And she would ask the question that every anthropologist asks of an archive: did they solve it?

She would not know. She would have only the evidence of a single year.

But she would recognize something else. She would recognize that the people whose voices appear in these pages — the nurses who gave interviews, the researchers who published findings, the lawyers who wrote analyses, the organizations that built new programs, the workers who went on strike, the administrators who hired safety professionals for the first time — were not passive. They were not silent. They were doing something.

Whether it was enough, she could not say. That part of the story had not yet been written when this archive was sealed.

What We Do Next Is Still Up to Us.

We are still inside this story. The anthropologist of 2226 does not have the ending yet. We do — or rather, we are writing it.

That is not a metaphor. It is literally true. The decisions being made right now — by health system CEOs, by safety officers, by compliance teams, by frontline staff who decide whether to report an incident, by legislators who decide how aggressively to enforce new laws, by organizations that decide whether to invest in prevention or continue absorbing the cost of reaction — are the decisions that will determine what that future archive looks like.

The OPTICS Newsroom was built to track this story honestly. Not to curate a highlight reel, and not to catastrophize. To document what is actually happening — the incidents and the progress, the legislation and the lawsuits, the strikes and the solutions — because an honest record is the first requirement of any serious response.

In the year since we started, 86 stories have told us that the problem is real, that it is widespread, that it is costly, and that it is not inevitable. WellSpan proved that. The organizations quietly building the accountability infrastructure that turns policy into practice are proving it.

The question is not whether workplace violence in healthcare can be reduced. The evidence says it can. The question is whether enough organizations will decide, in 2026, that it must be.

We will keep watching. We will keep reporting. And we hope — genuinely — that next year’s archive shows signs of improvement.

The anthropologist of 2226 is paying attention. What we leave her is still being written.

About David Kendric Brake

David Kendric Brake is CEO of OPTICS for Healthcare, an AI-native workplace violence prevention platform serving hospitals, physician practice groups, assisted living facilities, and skilled nursing organizations across the United States.

After 16 years in the book publishing industry, David became an entrepreneur with a consistent focus: building technology that helps organizations engage their target audiences, gather meaningful insights, and convert that information into actionable intelligence. That through-line runs directly into OPTICS — a platform designed not simply to produce compliance documents, but to assess organizational risk, surface gaps, generate facility-specific action plans, and give healthcare leaders and frontline staff the intelligence they need to prevent violence before it happens.

He served as consulting publisher for the CPI Workplace Violence Prevention Handbook alongside OPTICS co-founder Kim Urbanek in 2022 — the publication that sparked the creation of OPTICS for Healthcare. David and his wife Kelley, an HR consultant with a healthcare background, live in the Phoenix area — a concession to his year-round bicycling habit.

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