Ask a nurse about the worst part of a shift and you rarely hear about the volume of patients or the length of the hours. More often it's a moment: a fist, a slur, a family member's threat thrown across a bay while everyone pretends not to hear. For too long, this has been filed under "part of the job."
The numbers say otherwise. Drawing on Bureau of Labor Statistics data, research in Health Affairs Scholar found that healthcare workers shoulder a strikingly outsized share of the nation's workplace violence: roughly three-quarters of all nonfatal injuries caused by violence at work land on the people staffing our hospitals, clinics, and care facilities. And it isn't easing. In National Nurses United's 2025–26 workplace violence survey, more than a third of registered nurses reported that violence on their unit had risen over the past year, while only a small fraction saw it fall.
That's the backdrop for episode 41 of A Dose of Optimism, the healthcare-innovation podcast hosted by Omkar Kulkarni and presented by KidsX at Children's Hospital Los Angeles. The episode gathers three people looking hard at the same problem from three different vantage points. And, true to the show's name, arriving at reasons for hope.
The problem is worse than the reports suggest
Sandy Hall, executive director of PCS quality, safety, and patient-centered services at Children's Hospital Los Angeles, opens up the pediatric picture (a setting most of us assume is gentler than it is). Families arrive frightened and stretched thin, and fear has a way of curdling into aggression. Behavioral health and neurodivergent patients, meanwhile, may lash out in ways they cannot control, leaving frontline staff bruised in body and spirit.
Hall names something that keeps the crisis half-hidden: the "pediatric pass," a reluctance to log incidents in a children's hospital, as though the setting itself should soften what happened. It doesn't. What it does is bury the data that leaders need, and leave the behavioral health surge — already straining every corner of the system — to grow in the dark.
Making it safe to call for help
Ali Al Jabry, CEO of Kwema, brings an answer aimed at the sharpest edge of the problem: the seconds when a clinician needs help and cannot safely reach for a phone or shout across a room. Kwema builds a smart badge reel with a silent panic button; the badge already clipped to nearly every scrubs pocket, quietly turned into a lifeline. Press it, and the system pings hospital security with the wearer's real-time location, all without escalating a situation that's already on a knife's edge. It plugs into the IT infrastructure hospitals already run, which means it can move from idea to hallway without a year of integration headaches.
Safety and support are the same conversation
John Bracaglia, CEO and co-founder of Marvin, widens the lens. Violence, burnout, turnover...these aren't separate line items. They're symptoms of the same $70 billion healthcare workforce crisis, and they compound one another.
Marvin's response is mental health support built for healthcare workers rather than borrowed from a generic benefits catalog. The counselors understand clinical culture (the language, the moral weight, the intense hours) so members don't spend the first three sessions explaining what a code is. The model is opt-out rather than opt-in, which flips the psychology of asking for help: support becomes the default, and the quiet shame of raising a hand falls away.
The outcomes make the case plainly. Among nurses who engage with Marvin, retention holds at 94.5%, set against a national baseline closer to 79%. Keeping people safe and keeping people whole turn out to be the same project, measured from two directions.
Three answers, one question
What makes the episode worth your time is the way these threads braid together. A badge that summons help in seconds. A reporting culture honest enough to see the whole problem. Counseling that meets clinicians where they actually live. Each addresses a different moment in a caregiver's day, and together they sketch something rare in this conversation: a way forward that treats frontline staff as people worth protecting, not resources to replace.
Workplace violence in hospitals has been healthcare's tolerated hazard for a generation. This conversation is a small argument that it doesn't have to stay that way.
For hospital and health system leaders looking to address the issue directly, the American Hospital Association maintains a library of workplace violence prevention resources.
