Celebrating Health Care Heroes While Reducing Violence in the Workplace

In the five years since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, health care workers went from being celebrated as heroes to experiencing abuse and violence. During a session at the SHSMD Connections Conference in October 2024, Henry Ford Health and University of Vermont Health Network shared their respective strategies for “turning around the narrative” to create new awareness about violence against health care workers and how to better protect them.

To begin, the presenters—Ara Telbelian, Director of Marketing, Brand Management for Henry Ford Medical Group/Henry Ford Health; Ryan Mercer, Senior Multimedia Communications Specialist, Communications and Engagement Strategies for University of Vermont Health Network; and Bonita Brodt, System Vice President, Communications and Engagement Strategies for University of Vermont Health Network—noted that although awareness of issues related to violence against health workers increased during the pandemic, it is a problem that predates it.

In fact, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, violence against health care staff has increased steadily over the past decade. In all, health workers are five times more likely to be assaulted than those in other industries.

“I joined the health system in 2017, and it really just took a little while for me to start hearing about episodes of violence on patient floors or emergency departments,” Brodt recalls. “Right before the pandemic, we were still hearing these stories across our health system, no matter how big or small our hospitals were. And it really gave us pause. At that point, we started to think about how to tell this story.”

The initiative was interrupted by the challenges and changing priorities of the pandemic, which also brought the issue to the forefront. The 2023 Violence Study of Healthcare Workers and Systems Survey reported that 75% of staff in critical care experienced violence in the past year, which coincides with the latter stages of the global public health crisis. The pandemic was a “very difficult time in terms of violence against caregivers and each other,” Brodt notes. “But what we noticed pulling out of [the pandemic] in our health system is that [the violence] didn’t stop. It was almost … part of the fabric.”

The “Bigger Idea” Strategy

As the world emerged from the pandemic, University of Vermont Health Network decided to focus on how it could take a leadership role in telling the story of violence against health care workers. Brodt remembers meeting initially with clinical leaders and being “surprised by both how prevalent the stories of violence had become and how willing people were to share their stories so others could understand what was happening and the toll it was taking on health care workers.”

“These stories were not difficult to find,” she says. “The hard part was listening to them, because they are hard to hear.”

Still, in hearing the stories, leadership at University of Vermont Health Network realized they had an opportunity to humanize this crisis, she adds.

To do so, the system’s Communications and Engagement Strategies team executed a storytelling project featuring front-line caregivers who shared their stories of violence while providing care, with the goal of giving visibility and voice to health care workers who endure violence.

“We saw the power of this story as letting them carry it,” Brodt explains.

The campaign, called “End the Silence on Health Care Violence,” featured providers and staff telling their stories, in their own words, through video testimonials, which were posted to the health system’s website and social media feeds, according to Mercer. To date, the campaign has garnered more than 1 million views. (Vermont’s population is approximately 620,000.)

“End the Silence” was developed based on three “guiding principles,” Brodt says:

1. presenting violence against health care workers as a national problem;
2. highlighting the issue without demonizing patients; and
3. giving health care workers a voice.

“And that voice was authentic storytelling in their own words,” Mercer adds. “We didn’t try to script or polish experiences health care staff were sharing with us.”

In keeping with these principles, the campaign is primarily presented in black and white, so that the focus is starkly on the people and the impact of what they had to say, Brodt explains. It also takes a very journalistic approach: telling a story and using it to guide action.

To get the campaign in front of as big an audience as possible, the communications team worked with The New York Times, which adapted the original video and published it in their Opinion Video section. A commentary and related video published in October 2023 garnered 4.6 million views within a month, making it the second most viewed opinion piece on the paper’s social media platforms at the time. The health system also developed print and digital posters, with QR codes guiding people to the campaign online.

The resulting attention led to University of Vermont Health Network CEO Sunny Eappen, MD, MBA, being interviewed by Becker’s Hospital Review. Brodt expresses deep appreciation for the frontline caregivers at UVM Health Network who shared their brave stories and for the health system’s leadership for supporting the work that brought national visibility to the human impact of violence against health care workers—an issue that hospitals across the country are struggling with, and for which there is no simple fix.

“Even though we embarked on this project to tell a story, not necessarily to make calls to action or come up with solutions, the internal conversations that followed within our organization produced both,” Mercer notes.

The Henry Ford Health Approach 

Meanwhile, Henry Ford Health developed and implemented an effective omni-channel strategy to raise awareness of, educate patients about, and protect team members from violent behavior.

According to system data, between 2017 and 2022, Henry Ford Health saw a 136% increase in workplace violence, including 62% verbal incidents and 36% physical incidents.

To create the program, system leadership launched an executive steering committee and work groups including representatives from human resources, security, facilities, development, care experience, operations, and marketing and communications. Their objectives, Telbelian says, were to develop a plan that:

• fosters a safe and secure environment for all team members, patients and families;
• retains staff;
• drives a culture of belonging;
• improves team member engagement scores;
• positively affects patient experience and metrics;
• secures community support;
• enhances brand reputation; and
• yields measurable outcomes on key performance indicators such as awareness (engagement/sentiment) and reductions in violence activities.

In addition to enhancing security and staff training, the effort yielded a new campaign, called “The Truth Heals,” for internal and external communication on the issue. The campaign used a multi-tactic approach that included:

• text alerts for staff;
• an op-ed in the Detroit News written by system CEO Bob Riney, who started as a security officer at Henry Ford Health;
• information in the team member daily newsletter;
• pull-up banners, posters and informational pieces in every exam room and employee area, with messaging for patients and team members; and
• a toll-free help line for team members answered 24/7.

Elements of the campaign were also emailed to more than 532,000 patients. In addition, patient outreach featured paid digital and social media ads, according to Telbelian.

However, because “our focus has always been the safety of our team members,” he adds, the initiative saw the creation of a Violence Strategy Governance that provides guidance on prevention, intervention and after care for victims. The health system also worked with legislators in Michigan to revise the state’s penal code to enhance punishment for offenders involved in health worker violence.

Since the implementation of the program, Henry Ford Health has seen a 29% decrease in workplace violence.

“This was not only a well-rounded communication campaign, but we worked with the community, our partners in the law enforcement arena as well as the [state] legislature,” Telbelian says. “In the end, all of our work was done to protect our team members, and we have seen an impact.”