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FrancoAngeli Journals

Materiali per la ricerca e l'approfondimento

No. 134 (2025)

Epidemiology of violence against healthcare workers. Results of the FIASO 2025 survey

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3280/mesa2025-134oa22040
Submitted
febbraio 10, 2026
Published
2026-04-24

Abstract

Violence against healthcare workers is currently a widespread problem throughout the world. The consequences affect both individual workers, with risks to their safety and health, and healthcare organizations, users, and their relationship with facilities.
Although a series of regulatory measures have been approved in Italy in recent years to protect healthcare and social-healthcare workers, acts of physical and verbal violence against them are widespread and increasingly serious, with a number of issues still to be clarified and a need to develop further strategies to contain the risk.
In order to obtain a clearer picture and to be able to outline the type and numbers of incidents more accurately, FIASO has promoted a survey, which it plans to repeat annually, on the epidemiology of incidents of violence against healthcare workers and the methods adopted to deal with them. The results show that assaults appear to have increased slightly between 2023 and 2024, record the good results achieved by the measures put in place for risk prevention and containment, and confirm the need to invest in integrated strategies capable of addressing the multiple aspects that characterize its complexity.

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