As healthcare administrators strategize safety initiatives and evaluate needs for 2025, mitigating violence in healthcare remains a top priority. When advocating for future initiatives, healthcare leaders must advocate for safety programs that better protect staff and also benefit their facility’s bottom line.
But how do leaders measure ROI on safety initiatives that address workplace violence in healthcare? How can they effectively communicate value as they engage with budgetary decision-makers?
Here are some communication strategies healthcare leaders should consider as they define budgetary requirements for safety initiative success in support of healthcare workers in the coming year.
Demonstrate ROI of Safety Measures in Financial Terms
When communicating with decision-makers, healthcare leaders can effectively position safety solutions in terms of cost savings and financial returns. The troubling frequency of workplace violence in healthcare comes with a hefty price tag, conservatively reported to be as high as $167 billion annually. An article published in The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety estimated that costs associated with non-fatal workplace violence in healthcare settings range from $109,000 per year for treatment and indemnity among injured nurses to over $330,000 per year in a single hospital system.1
Safety measures can mitigate violent incidents and reduce costs. Some high-cost items associated with violence include:
- Physical treatment and rehabilitation therapies for injured workers
- Counseling associated with worker psychological trauma
- Labor and training costs associated with turnover and temporary staffing
- Legal fees and lawsuits
Without multi-layer safety initiatives in place to reduce workplace violence in healthcare, costs associated with legal consequences alone can be steep, sometimes valued in the millions of dollars per case. These unpredictable costs can upend budgetary planning. Budgeting for programs that promote increased worker safety, empowerment, and control is far more predictable. Workers who feel safer and more in control provide better patient care.
Leading the conversation with these financial realities, strategies, and measurable objectives is the best means to justify spending on safety initiatives. When you speak this language with clarity and focus, the ROI on safety initiatives becomes evident to everyone.
Present Facts That Ensure Data-Driven Decisions
Analyzing the ROI of past and current safety measures helps estimate future returns by comparing incident rates and costs before and after implementation. This visual and data-driven analysis informs budget decisions and highlights the program’s effectiveness, aiding decision-makers in understanding success and identifying areas for further investment.
Some of those data points may include a decrease or reduction of:
- Workplace violence incidents
- Injuries due to violence
- Costs related to worker injury and trauma
- Worker turnover and talent retention rates
- PTO or extended leave due to injury and/or burnout
Detailed reporting on workplace safety helps set benchmarks for success over time. One of the most valuable sources of data is staff surveys. Staff surveys can gather insight on key areas of implementation like:
- Staff impressions of working conditions before implementing safety initiatives
- Staff impressions of new safety initiatives
- How safe staff feel while on the job
- How well safety programs support staff
- Which safety enhancements have made the most impact on staff well-being
It helps to be straightforward when outlining questions in a staff survey. When applicable, questions presented on a “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree” scale from one to ten can create clarity and transparency while also collecting essential information.
Good examples include:
- On a scale of 1-10, how safe do you feel at work?
- How often do you think about your safety at work?
- 0-25% of the time
- 26-50% of the time
- 51-75% of the time
- 76% or more of the time
- Supervisors address safety concerns responsively and quickly.
- Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree
- Workplace safety is a priority at my organization.
- Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree
- I have the training to deal with issues related to safety and security.
- Yes
- No
Survey responses can demonstrate how safety initiatives impact job satisfaction. It can also reveal areas that require greater attention to retain staff or foster a more satisfying and productive environment. Staff perspectives help rationalize continued investment in safety initiatives because they make a real-world case for implementation. Persuasive data points like these make budget planning much easier for decision-makers.
Include Labor and Retention Costs
The effectiveness of healthcare safety initiatives directly impacts job satisfaction and retention. Having a stable workforce with low turnover has a significant dollar value. When skilled workers leave their jobs due to safety concerns, healthcare organizations do not access the full value of their labor.
Turnover is a significant financial concern, and due to the uptick in violence in healthcare today, it is only growing. Data published last year showed that 19% of nurses left their role due to safety, and 37% considered leaving the profession.2 With current turnover rates hovering around 20% in healthcare settings, this results in an average loss of $3.9M – $5.8M per hospital.3
By proactively enhancing safety, you can stabilize your workforce and strengthen retention. When safety programs are in place, hospitals experience fewer workers’ compensation claims, reduced associated medical expenses, and fewer instances of extended paid leave. And when every percentage change in RN turnover can save the average hospital $262,500 per year,3 safety initiatives have the potential to fund themselves.
Presenting the return on safety initiatives in this context will be another way to guide budgetary decision-makers in considering the value of funding safety programs.
Share Industry Case Studies of Safety Initiative Success
Decision-makers respond well to industry best practices. Since workplace violence in healthcare is a high-profile concern across all healthcare facilities, proposing and adopting proactive responses implemented by other organizations will count for a lot. To reinforce effectiveness, powerful industry stories of successful safety measures and programs help root budgetary decisions into proven, real-world scenarios.
Presenting industry case studies can:
- Identify the leaders in the healthcare industry who excel in reducing workplace violence and enhancing worker safety
- Highlight the specific methods these organizations have employed to proactively tackle workplace violence through effective safety programs
- Showcase the financial challenges these organizations have avoided by implementing strong safety programs, along with improvements in worker productivity and job satisfaction
- Explore innovative strategies to rethink and better address challenges related to staff retention and turnover, along with achieving improved outcomes
- Provide guidance on how your organization can replicate and potentially surpass past successes while enhancing brand reputation
Stories are powerful tools that help set standards and best practices for worker safety. Healthy comparisons between organizations also help decision-makers rationalize budgetary spending with measured and practical real-world outcomes.
Reducing Workplace Violence in Healthcare is a Budgetary Imperative
Safety programs that help reduce incidents of violence in the workplace add to the bottom line. That makes them more than just a product of ethical decision-making. Protecting workers means protecting an organization’s value in all kinds of ways. It makes sense to make safety initiatives a budgetary priority. When decision-makers who set annual budgets understand this, making the right decision becomes easier.
Are you ready to discover how CENTEGIX can help you protect your staff, colleagues, and those in your care? We’ve built the CENTEGIX Safety Platform to support you in the single most critical factor of incident response: time.
1 Arnetz JE. The Joint Commission’s New and Revised Workplace Violence Prevention Standards for Hospitals: A Major Step Forward Toward Improved Quality and Safety. Jt Comm J Qual Patient Saf. 2022 Apr;48(4):241-245. doi: 10.1016/j.jcjq.2022.02.001. Epub 2022 Feb 5. PMID: 35193809; PMCID: PMC8816837.
2 Crisis Prevention Institute. 2024 Annual Report: Workplace Violence Prevention Training. Crisis Prevention Institute, Apr. 2024. PDF file.
3 NSI Nursing Solutions. NSI National Health Care Retention and RN Staffing Report. NSI Nursing Solutions, 2024, https://www.nsinursingsolutions.com/documents/library/nsi_national_health_care_retention_report.pdf.