1 in 7 NHS Staff Physically Assaulted: The Hospital Security Failure No One Wants to Discuss

The 2025 NHS Staff Survey, published by NHS England in March 2026, recorded responses from 766,285 staff across England. One headline figure overshadowed the rest: 14.47 per cent of respondents – close to one in seven – said they had experienced at least one incident of physical violence from a patient, a member of a patient’s family, or another member of the public in the previous twelve months. It is the highest reading in three years.

For anyone responsible for hospital security, that number is not abstract. It translates into hundreds of thousands of recorded assaults on staff who already work under acute operational pressure. And it raises an uncomfortable question for trusts, integrated care boards, and the private operators who provide security cover to the wider NHS estate: is hospital security being treated as a serious, board-level risk, or as a line item to be trimmed when budgets tighten?

What the data actually says

NHS England published the survey on 12 March 2026, with fieldwork carried out in autumn 2025. Alongside the 14.47 per cent figure for physical violence from patients and the public, the survey also recorded that around 25 per cent of staff had experienced harassment or abuse from the same group. Smaller proportions – 0.75 per cent and 1.8 per cent respectively – reported violence from managers or colleagues.

The picture worsens sharply in specific settings. Ambulance trusts continue to carry the heaviest burden, with reporting suggesting roughly 52 per cent of ambulance staff experienced at least one violent incident, and close to one in three reporting unwanted sexual behaviour from patients or the public. Emergency departments, mental health units, and out-of-hours services consistently sit at the high end of the distribution.

UNISON has used the survey to call for stronger protections for frontline NHS workers, citing thousands of recorded assaults across individual ambulance services and acute trusts. The Royal College of Emergency Medicine has separately described the rise in physical violence as unacceptable and called for a coordinated national response.

Why hospitals are uniquely difficult sites to secure

Hospitals carry a combination of risk factors that few other workplaces share. They are open, often twenty-four hours a day. Patients arrive in pain, intoxicated, frightened, or in mental health crisis. Families arrive distressed. Waiting times in emergency departments are a known flashpoint. Staff are visible, predictable in their movement, and frequently lone-working in corridors, side rooms, and ambulance bays.

The security response has historically been uneven. Some trusts run mature in-house security teams with formal violence reduction programmes, body-worn cameras, and structured de-escalation training. Others rely on a small contracted presence with minimal integration into clinical workflows. The variation is one of the reasons identical incidents can play out very differently depending on which hospital they occur in.

The measures that are now being adopted

A growing number of trusts are responding with concrete operational changes. University Hospitals Sussex NHS Foundation Trust, which runs sites in Brighton, Worthing, Haywards Heath, and Chichester, has rolled out body-worn cameras for staff in higher-risk areas and installed knife amnesty bins on hospital premises. The trust also operates a formal warning system, under which patients or visitors displaying threatening or abusive behaviour can be issued with notices restricting their attendance at hospital sites except in emergencies.

Other measures spreading across the sector include:

• Dedicated security officers stationed in emergency departments during peak hours rather than roving the wider site.
• Improved incident reporting and tracking systems, so repeat offenders are identified earlier.
• Closer partnership working with local police, including memoranda of understanding on response and information-sharing.
• Physical hardening of triage and reception areas, including reinforced glazing and controlled access between waiting and clinical zones.
• Structured de-escalation and conflict resolution training for clinical staff, sometimes delivered alongside security teams.

RAND’s evaluation work on body-worn cameras in the ambulance sector and Royal College of Nursing guidance both point in the same direction: cameras and similar tools are most effective when they sit inside a wider programme – training, reporting, enforcement – rather than as a standalone deterrent.

What this means for hospital and corporate site managers

For those responsible for hospitals, private healthcare facilities, and adjacent corporate sites such as clinical research centres or pharmaceutical offices, the survey is a useful prompt for a structured review. Practical steps worth considering include:

• Map your highest-risk points. Emergency departments, mental health units, maternity reception, and overnight ambulance bays are typically where most incidents concentrate.
• Confirm officer coverage matches the risk profile. A two-officer establishment that looks adequate on paper often collapses at 11pm on a Friday in a busy A&E.
• Check that reporting flows actually work. If frontline staff have stopped logging incidents because nothing happens afterwards, the numbers you see at board level are no longer reliable.
• Audit body-worn camera policies. Storage, retention, evidential standards, and disclosure to police all need to be documented before footage is needed in a prosecution.
• Integrate security and clinical training. De-escalation works best when the two teams have practised together.

For private corporate clients with healthcare-adjacent operations, the same principles apply: the risk does not stop at the hospital boundary, and security planning needs to reflect the realities documented in the staff survey rather than an idealised version of the site.

Need a security review?

Our team works with healthcare, corporate, and high-footfall sites across London and the wider UK on violence reduction, manned guarding, and integrated security planning. If you would like a structured review of your current arrangements – coverage, reporting, training, physical measures – we are happy to discuss it.

Call us on 020 3700 0967, email info@secureonsitesecurity.co.uk, or visit our contact page to get in touch. You can also read more about our manned guarding services and our work with corporate clients.