House Bill Would Make Assaulting a Health Care Worker a Felony

Featured image: The Massachusetts State House on Beacon Hill in Boston, Jan. 1, 2013 (file photo). Photo: Daderot, Wikimedia Commons, CC0 1.0 public domain.

Key points drawn from the official histories of H.4767 and S.3184, The Boston Globe’s Nov. 12, 2026, report, State House News Service’s Sept. 23 coverage of the conference committee, and MHA’s June 6, 2025, #HAVHope post.

A Massachusetts health care violence bill that would toughen the response to assaults on hospital and other care workers is in a House-Senate conference committee, where negotiators still disagree on felony penalties, warrantless arrests, and how the law would apply in group homes for people with disabilities, according to The Boston Globe and earlier State House News Service reporting.

The Globe, in a Thursday, Nov. 12, 2026, account of the negotiations, said Massachusetts may soon approve legislation addressing a surge in violence against health care workers, but that the proposal faces criticism it could “inadvertently criminalize the behavior of people with disabilities.” Nothing in the official bill history shows a final conference report or an enacted law as of Thursday evening, Eastern Time.

Two bills, and the penalties still in dispute

The House bill, H.4767, is titled “An Act requiring health care employers to develop and implement programs to prevent workplace violence.” The House passed it 158 to 0 on Nov. 19, 2025, according to the Legislature’s bill history. The Senate, on July 16, 2026, stripped out the House text, substituted its own language, and passed that version, which was reprinted as S.3184. On July 23, the House non-concurred, and each branch appointed conferees, the official history shows. The House panel is Representatives Michael Day, Brandy Fluker-Reid, and Hannah Kane. The Senate named Senators Cindy Friedman, Joan Lovely, and Kelly Dooner.

The two versions treat criminal penalties differently. The Globe reported that the House bill would make assaulting and injuring a worker on the job a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison, depending on the severity of the injury, and that an assault would have to be committed “knowingly and intentionally” to be considered a felony. The Senate bill, the Globe said, does not raise those incidents to felony offenses but gives police expanded power to arrest and detain people without a warrant when there is probable cause for misdemeanor assault. The Senate version also requires police to use de-escalation and diversion techniques, according to the Globe.

State House News Service, in a Sept. 23 report on a public conference-committee discussion, gave a more detailed readout of the House penalties: classification as felony offenses, with perpetrators of attacks that result in serious bodily injury facing up to 10 years in state prison, up to 2½ years in a house of correction or jail, a fine of $500 to $5,000, or a combination of fines and incarceration. The Senate bill, that report said, imposes no financial penalty and categorizes assaults on health care workers as misdemeanors, with perpetrators facing up to 2½ years in a house of correction, and allows warrantless arrests if an officer has probable cause to believe someone assaulted a health care worker.

Day, the lead House negotiator and House chair of the Joint Committee on the Judiciary, told the conference committee that de-escalation and separation is usually the default in group homes, and that the House bill’s higher threshold for arrest is meant to prevent people from being arrested when the issue could be handled another way, State House News Service reported. “That is a fairly high standard still,” Day said, describing a line for cases of serious injury or of someone who “lashed out intentionally, knowingly.” He also said he was wary of a misdemeanor-arrest power that could lead law enforcement to “potentially target individuals within misdemeanor arrest.”

Friedman, an Arlington Democrat and the lead Senate negotiator, told the Globe by text, “The concerns of the disability community and mental health community are definitely part of the conversation.” In the September committee session, she raised the question of what happens to a person in a group home who is “clearly already identified as somebody who’s severely disabled,” and where that person would be taken if removed, according to State House News Service.

What the data shows about violence on the job

Health care worker groups have sought state action for more than a decade, the Globe reported. The Massachusetts Health and Hospital Association said on June 6, 2025, as part of a national awareness day it marks as #HAVHope, that “every 36 minutes, a worker in a Massachusetts hospital is subject to an act of violence or a threat,” and that health care workers experience a violent incident at least five times more often than the average private-sector worker. The Globe, citing MHA data, reported a closely related figure of once every 38 minutes as of 2025. An earlier MHA report, released on Jan. 30, 2023, and based on a monthly survey of 56 acute and post-acute hospitals, found a case of physical assault, verbal abuse, or threats every 38 minutes.

That January 2023 release also broke out who was targeted in the incidents hospitals reported: nurses accounted for 38% of workplace-violence incidents, followed by security personnel at 27% and other clinical staff at 19%. The release did not break out the remaining 16% of incidents. The Globe, in Thursday’s story, said nurses are the victims more than a third of the time, which is consistent with that earlier share, and that almost 40% of reported mistreatment happens in emergency departments. The Globe also reported that Massachusetts emergency departments take a median of 4½ hours to admit and treat patients, and that at some hospitals the wait can reach eight hours or longer.

Melisa Lai-Becker, chief of emergency medicine at Mass General Brigham, told the Globe that the surge in violence is in large part driven by frustration over longer wait times and overcrowding in overtaxed emergency departments, and that perpetrators are often patients, though visitors have also been involved. “No amount of apology for the waiting can make up for the fact that everyone sees the brokenness of the system,” she said.

A Massachusetts Nurses Association survey, cited by GBH News in August, found that seven out of 10 nurses had experienced abuse or violence at work in the previous two years. That survey is older than this week’s Globe report, but it is one of the figures union advocates have used in the same debate. Hospital staffing pressures have also been in the Boston news this week for a different reason: Brigham and Women’s Hospital nurses reached a tentative contract on Wednesday after a long dispute that included staffing and temporary-nurse issues, as The Boston Report reported. That labor agreement is not the legislation on Beacon Hill.

Why disability advocates want group homes carved out

The bills would require health care facilities to develop violence-mitigation strategies and would grant workers new safeguards, including protection against retaliation for reporting abuse, dedicated time off to manage treatment or court proceedings after a workplace assault, and privacy protections, the Globe reported. The conditions would not apply to nursing homes, clinics, home health agencies, or hospices, according to the Globe, but they would apply to group homes overseen by the state that offer permanent residences and on-site supportive care for people with physical, mental, or behavioral limitations.

That last point is the core of the disability community’s objection. Advocates told the Globe they worry that workers in group homes could use the legislation to have difficult residents removed. The Senate version, the Globe reported, would delay the implementation of warrantless arrests at group homes for a year and require the state to produce a report on de-escalation practices and training. State House News Service said the Senate bill directs the Executive Offices of Health and Human Services and Public Safety and Security to issue recommendations on best practices and staff training standards to de-escalate violent or threatening actions and “minimize reliance on law enforcement intervention” in group homes.

Those concerns were already on the record this summer. GBH News reported on Aug. 20 that disability groups, including the Arc of Massachusetts, support much of the bill — especially requirements that facilities do risk and safety evaluations and create violence-prevention plans — but argue that a broad definition of health care facilities that includes group homes could have “unintentional consequences.” Maura Sullivan, the Arc’s CEO, told GBH, “I think the language of the bill unintentionally harms our community.” She urged lawmakers to exclude Department of Developmental Services group homes from some provisions, saying that for many people with profound autism and other conditions, a group home is the safest place they have, and that removing someone from that setting could escalate behavior. “There is no other place for them to go,” she said.

State Sen. Robyn Kennedy, a Worcester Democrat, told GBH she had introduced an amendment that would put a one-year pause on the arrest provision for group homes so alternatives could be explored. “We still want to get employees in group homes to have the access to the same supports that the bill overall includes,” she said. “But I share the concerns that the advocates referenced when it comes specifically to what it would mean for this new warrantless arrest in a group home setting and how that is different.”

Jennifer Bertrand, deputy director of the Massachusetts Developmental Disabilities Council, told the Globe, “We know that there’s a certain amount of discrimination in our health care systems for people with disabilities.” Lai-Becker, of Mass General Brigham, said health care workers would not seek to use expanded protections against people whose behavior causes inadvertent harm. “We don’t want to punish people who are acting out without realizing they are hurting people,” she said.

Where the talks stand

The six-person conference committee held its first meeting on Sept. 3, about a month after it was formed, State House News Service reported, and discussed the main disagreements in public on Sept. 23. The bill is one of several major measures lawmakers sent to conference before regularly scheduled formal sessions ended for the year on July 31, that report said. The Globe’s Thursday story shows the same issues — felony versus misdemeanor treatment, warrantless arrests, and group homes — still unsettled more than two months later.

Health care workers already have the option to press charges against people who harm them at work, the Globe noted; the legislation could streamline police response or make penalties more severe. Day told conferees in September that the bill is meant to send a message that it is wrong to intentionally assault a health care worker. Whether that message takes the form of a felony, a misdemeanor with new arrest authority, a delayed rule for group homes, or some mix of those approaches is the question still in front of the conference committee, and in front of the Legislature if a compromise reaches the floor.

Until conferees file a report, and until both branches and the governor act on it, H.4767 and S.3184 remain competing drafts, not the law of Massachusetts.

Sources

• The Boston Globe: Disability advocates fear Mass. health care violence bill goes too far
• Massachusetts Legislature: Bill H.4767, 194th General Court
• State House News Service: Negotiators debate solutions to violence against healthcare workers (Sept. 23, 2026)
• Massachusetts Health and Hospital Association: #HAVHope 2025: Massachusetts Hospitals Against Violence (June 6, 2025)
• Massachusetts Health and Hospital Association: MHA Members Issue a United Call to Action on Violence in Healthcare Facilities (Jan. 30, 2023)
• GBH News: Disability advocates worry about ‘unintentional harm’ in bill to protect health care workers (Aug. 20, 2026)