Physicians faced numerous challenges in 2024, from increased legal pitfalls in some areas of care to deteriorating physician autonomy.
But some physicians have expressed concerns about an emerging trend: the rise in violent encounters in healthcare settings.
"In 2024, one of the biggest obstacles was and is the unchecked violence being increasingly seen in our hospitals, clinics, emergency departments and other workplaces nationwide. Healthcare is now noted as America's most dangerous profession due to workplace violence," Harry Severance, MD, adjunct assistant professor at Durham, N.C.-based Duke University School of Medicine, told Becker's.
"This increasing violence toward doctors — and other healthcare workers — is one signal of deep critical disruptions within and consumer dissatisfaction with our current system," he added.
In a recent opinion essay for Medpage Today, Chloe Lee, MD, a psychiatry resident at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York, detailed her recent experience dealing with a patient who physically assaulted her. She categorized the incident as evidence of "normalized violence" in healthcare spaces.
In 2018, healthcare workers comprised 73% of all nonfatal workplace injuries due to violence, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And according to a 2024 poll by the American College of Emergency Physicians, 91% of emergency physicians reported that either they or a colleague were the victim of violence in the last year.
Dr. Lee attributes this to an increased normalization of violence in the larger political climate in 2024.
"The issue is multifactorial. In the hospital, we often see people at their worst, when their decision-making and impulse control may be suboptimal. But I wonder whether something else might be at play: the normalization of violence in our current political climate," she said. "This is not to say that any politician … is unilaterally responsible for violence against doctors. But our politicians indisputably have a problem with volatile rhetoric promoting violence."
Dr. Severance attributes this rise in healthcare violence to severe dissatisfaction in healthcare among patients.
"It is, in some ways understandable, that consumers, increasingly frustrated by a seemingly impenetrable, increasingly unaffordable and perceptibly denial-inclined system will strike out at one of the few accessible targets. In clinical situations, this will be doctors, nurses and other hands-on healthcare workers," he said.
Dr. Severance also said that this uptick in violence could eventually push physicians out of the practice or dissuade potential medical students from seeking out careers in the profession. This would in turn further exacerbate the issues driving frustrations among patients.
"This consumer violence condition also paradoxically further contributes to consumer perception of an inaccessible and denial-based system," he said. "To further add to the shortage and access problems, we are now seeing fewer and fewer bright young minds expressing interest in careers in healthcare due to these increasingly abusive and violent conditions."