What the DOL's New Federal Audit Means for Healthcare Workplace Violence Prevention

A plain-language overview of the OIG's FY 2026 Audit Workplan — and what it signals for healthcare leaders

If you work in healthcare safety, here's a headline worth paying attention to: the Department of Labor's Office of Inspector General (OIG) has announced it will audit OSHA's workplace violence prevention efforts for the first time in 25 years.

That number should stop you cold. Twenty-five years.

The audit is included in the DOL OIG's Fiscal Year 2026 Audit Workplan — a public document outlining the oversight reviews the agency plans to complete or initiate this fiscal year. Buried in that workplan is a section that deserves far more attention than it has received.

What the Workplan Actually Says

The OIG's planned audit will examine what actions OSHA has taken — over the past quarter century — to address and prevent workplace violence. The last time this was reviewed was September 2001. That audit found OSHA needed to take additional steps to address workplace violence issues, improve training and outreach efforts, and develop a recordkeeping system to track workplace violence data.

Those were the findings in 2001. The question the upcoming audit will answer is: how much has actually changed?

The workplan offers one stark data point to frame the stakes. Of the 5,486 fatal workplace injuries recorded in the United States in 2022, 849 — nearly 16 percent — were cases of intentional injury by another person. Acts of violence and other injuries are now the third leading cause of fatal occupational injuries in the country.

The Healthcare Connection

The workplan's focus is broad, but the healthcare implications are specific and urgent. OSHA's potential standard on workplace violence in healthcare and social assistance has been on the regulatory agenda for years. As of the agency's most recent regulatory agenda, it was listed under "long-term actions" — meaning no meaningful rulemaking progress was expected anytime soon.

For healthcare leaders, that classification is more than bureaucratic language. It means the regulatory floor for protecting your workforce remains largely where it was decades ago — and that healthcare organizations cannot rely on federal standards to define their minimum obligation to staff.

Key Takeaways for Healthcare Leaders

There are three things worth drawing from this workplan for any healthcare system, hospital, or safety officer thinking about where they stand:

1. Federal oversight has been largely absent. A 25-year gap between audits is not an oversight — it is a signal that workplace violence has lacked sustained federal attention even as the problem has grown. Healthcare leaders who have been waiting for regulatory clarity before acting have been waiting a long time, and the wait is not over.

2. OSHA's recordkeeping gaps are not just a federal problem. The 2001 audit found that OSHA didn't track workplace violence data effectively. Many healthcare organizations face the same challenge internally — incidents go unreported, near-misses are undocumented, and patterns go undetected until they become crises. The organizations best positioned when federal scrutiny does arrive will be those who already have data.

3. Proactive programs will define the new standard. Whether or not the audit produces new regulation, it will generate public attention and stakeholder pressure. Health systems with structured, documented prevention programs — built around assessment, analysis, and accountability — will be in a fundamentally different position than those relying on policy binders and incident forms.

The full DOL OIG FY 2026 Audit Workplan is publicly available. It's a dense read, but this section is worth your time.

Federal oversight of workplace violence is waking up. The organizations that act now won't be scrambling to catch up when it does.

About David Brake

DAVID is the Co-founder and CEO of OPTICS for Healthcare, an AI-first company dedicated to creating safer healthcare environments for staff, patients, and the public. The OPTICS platform was designed to revolutionize how healthcare organizations approach facility assessments, enabling them to conduct comprehensive current-state evaluations, generate detailed gap analyses, and develop customized workplace violence policies and action-specific operational playbooks.