Please contact your members of Congress to request their support for a comprehensive workplace violence prevention plan for EMS. Please give 30 seconds of your time to ask your Senators and Representative.

S. 851 and H.R. 1309, the Workplace Violence Prevention for Health Care and Social Service Workers Act represents a long overdue change to protect America’s caring professions, including EMS, and would require OSHA to issue a Workplace Violence Prevention Standard, giving workers the security that their employers are implementing proven practices to reduce the risk of violence on the job.

• Addresses an epidemic of violence against healthcare and social service workers;

• Requires OSHA to create a federal workplace violence prevention standard mandating that employers develop comprehensive, workplace-specific plans to prevent violence before it happens;

• Sets a quick timeline on implementation to ensure timely protection for healthcare workers;

• Sets minimum requirements for the standard and for employers’ workplace violence prevention plans. These requirements include unit-specific assessments and implementation of prevention measures, including physical changes to the environment, staffing for patient care and security, employee involvement in all steps of the plan, hands on training, robust record keeping requirements including a violent incident log, and protections for employees to report incidents to their employer and law enforcement.