Samantha Wathan, Press Officer, Keep Our NHS Public
‘None of us feel safe’ – Those words, from an A&E nurse speaking to the Guardian this summer, sum up an escalating crisis across our health service. Violence against nurses and other frontline NHS staff is spiralling, leaving workers injured, traumatised and, in too many cases, driven out of the jobs they love and that the public relies upon them to do.
The numbers are shocking. Across 89 NHS trusts, physical assaults on A&E staff have almost doubled since 2019—from just over 2,000 incidents to more than 4,000 last year. Someone working in an emergency department in England is attacked every single day. Ambulance crews face a similar reality: there were seven violent incidents every day in 2024, some involving knives and other weapons. Many paramedics are now issued with stab-proof body armour, at a cost to the taxpayer of £675,000 in London alone.
And the problem is not confined to emergency care. Surveys show that nine in ten nurses and midwives have been physically assaulted during their careers. One in ten experiences violence daily. A third take time off work afterwards. A fifth change jobs. Many never return.
This violence is never excusable. Patients and families, however frightened or distressed, do not have the right to abuse the very people trying to help them. But we also cannot ignore the wider context in which these attacks are increasing.
The NHS – in all areas – continues to buckle under unprecedented pressure. Since 2019, the number of patients waiting more than 12 hours in A&E has exploded—up nineteen-fold in just five years. Instead of being admitted swiftly to a ward, patients are often left to wait for hours or even days in crowded corridors, often without privacy, dignity or proper clinical supervision. Staff shortages mean long queues for triage and assessment whilst ambulance crews can frequently spend entire shifts waiting outside hospitals to hand patients over. The chronic and long-standing lack of adequate social care means patients are backed up in the system, and the huge clinical vacancy rate exacerbates the length of time discharge can take.
It is in this environment of frustration, exhaustion and fear that tensions so often boil over. In addition, historic cuts to mental health provision mean that many patients are left in unsafe and inappropriate environments of busy emergency departments where violence is more likely to occur. Frontline staff are on the sharp end of systemic neglect. As in so many ways, when a patient lashes out, it is the workers who are now regularly bearing the brunt of underfunding and system neglect.
The link between NHS underfunding and rising violence could not be clearer. For more than a decade, health spending has lagged behind the needs of an ageing and growing population. Compared to other European nations, the UK invests far less per head in healthcare and has far fewer hospital beds, doctors and nurses. The results are visible daily: record waiting lists, dangerously overcrowded A&Es, patients left in the back of ambulances or lying on trolleys for hours.
None of this is the fault of staff but the product of political decisions to deprioritise health budgets and impose “efficiency savings” year after year. Ministers cannot now express shock at the consequences. When staff are attacked, they are attacked in a system that has been deliberately hollowed out.
Profiting from crisis
What adds insult to injury here (quite literally) is that while NHS trusts struggle to cope, private healthcare providers are being handed billions of pounds in taxpayers’ money. Instead of directing adequate resources into the public service, the Government is offering lucrative contracts to private firms to deliver operations, diagnostic scans and non-urgent treatment.
This is mis-sold to the public as a way to reduce waiting lists consistent with NHS founding principles as ‘free at the time of use’, but in reality, it diverts funding and staff away from the NHS. Private companies are free to “swoop in” to treat the easiest cases at high cost, while the NHS is left to care for the most complex, resource-intensive patients and with ever-weaker staffing levels.
Frontline workers see this for what it is: a slow seeping of public money into private profit, while their own wards, clinics and ambulances remain overstretched and unsafe. Staff are told to manage violence with body armour and security guards, while billions flow out of the NHS into corporate hands.
The personal toll on staff should not be underestimated. In the most extreme cases, staff are being left with PTSD and/or significant physical injuries as a direct result of violence from patients or their relatives.No health worker should face that reality. But unless the underlying pressures of staff shortages, corridor care and unacceptable delays to treatment and assessment are fixed, violence may very well remain endemic.
What needs to change?
Protecting staff requires more than promises to ‘invoke the full force of the law’, and additional CCTV or “zero tolerance” posters which, while sadly necessary, turn places of care into policed zones. It demands rebuilding the NHS and social care itself. That means real investment to restore safe staffing levels, bed capacity and community services, eliminating the need for so-called ‘corridor care’.
Far from a renewed commitment to the private sector in health which this government now champions, there should actually be an end to creeping privatisation, which only serves to drain resources away from the NHS and undermine the principle of universal, publicly funded care.
There must also be comprehensive mental and physical health support for all frontline NHS staff, and guaranteed justice when assaults occur. Currently support and debrief time in these instances is often non-existent, with workers just expected to ‘put up with it’ and continue with their work due to a chronic lack of employees on shift. This treatment is unacceptable and compounds the trauma that has occurred. The NHS must seriously improve how it cares for its own people and should be setting an example to patients and the public about the level of care and respect expected.
Above all, it means recognising that violence against NHS staff is not an isolated issue. It is a very distasteful symptom of a health service run down by austerity and opened up to profit. Unless we reverse that trend, the cycle of pressure, frustration and abuse will only worsen.
Samantha Wathan, Press Officer, Keep Our NHS Public
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