Creating Safety Together: Healing After Violence in Healthcare Settings
By Liz Friedman, GPS Group Peer Support CEO & Co-Founder
Healthcare workers are showing up to work every day in environments where violence has become an expected part of the job. In many hospitals, especially safety-net settings, assaults and threats happen so frequently that staff barely have time to process one incident before the next occurs. Nurses, CNAs, PCTs, techs, and others carry these experiences quietly while trying to continue giving skilled and compassionate care.
Healthcare facilities know this is the reality. Most organizations want to respond well. They offer employee assistance programs, resilience teams, counseling referrals, and sometimes rapid debriefings after major incidents. These resources matter, and they genuinely help the people who use them. But leaders are also recognizing that individual support alone cannot address something that’s fundamentally communal: Workplace violence doesn’t land on one person and resolve; it spreads through teams and entire departments.
And when the harm touches everyone, the healing needs to include everyone. Without ongoing places to talk about violence at work, silence becomes the unwritten rule. Newer staff quickly learn which stories are acceptable and which ones must be swallowed. Hard experiences turn into dark humor in the break room or are never spoken aloud at all. That is where trauma grows, when there is nowhere safe to place what was too much to hold alone.
This is the moment when structured, trauma-informed group care becomes essential.
Group spaces, when held well, give healthcare workers something they rarely get: a place to say the hard things. To talk about the moment their body froze. To name what it’s like to walk back into the same room where an assault happened. To speak of the shame they never should have to carry. To realize that others in the room understand.
That is exactly what the GPS model was built for. For healthcare facilities and hospitals facing high levels of workplace violence, GPS can help immediately by running focus groups to hear directly from affected staff, developing a tailored curriculum that reflects their realities, training facilitators and peer co-leaders, and by launching ongoing support groups where workers can come once, come occasionally, or return whenever the weight becomes too heavy.
The message is simple: Healthcare workers shouldn’t have to heal from violence alone. And they don’t have to. With the right container, the stories that silence people can become stories that connect them instead. That is how teams strengthen, how shame dissolves, and how healing becomes a shared, sustainable practice—not something workers are expected to manage in private between shifts.
Bring MASStrong To Your Healthcare Setting
GPS’s MASStrong program offers free GPS trainings, support groups, curriculums, and toolkits for Massachusetts medical, behavioral health, and community care workers and organizations. Eligible organizations can also apply for GPS partnership support and grants up to $10,000.
