Why "Felt Safety" Is the Missing Piece in Health Care Safety Programs  

July 21, 2026
Susan DriscollPresident and Chief Customer Officer, CPI

Walk into almost any hospital today, and you'll find the hardware of safety. Badge-activated panic buttons. Weapons detection systems at the entrance. Cameras watching every hallway. Health care organizations have made significant investments in physical safeguards over the past few years, and rightly so. Even though systems are starting to track behaviors in their EHR systems through tools like the Broset checklist, it hasn’t translated in a meaningful way to nurses and other staff members feeling safe.  

According to CPI's 2026 Workplace Violence Prevention Training Annual Report, 43% of health care professionals still feel only somewhat comfortable addressing a crisis. Another 11% feel outright uncomfortable. That's not a hardware or technology problem. It's a health care safety and confidence problem, and it has a name: felt safety. 

Quick answer: Felt safety is the body’s subjective experience of being safe, where staff feel genuinely prepared, supported, and confident to respond to a crisis. It's built through a system-wide approach to workplace violence prevention that includes regular and role-specific training, and it's the missing link between physical safety infrastructure and real staff readiness.

This post breaks down what felt safety in health care actually means and why it matters just as much any camera or panic button. Then we'll look at how organizations are building it.

Physical Safeguards Aren't Enough for Staff Safety

To be clear, physical infrastructure matters. Weapons detection, camera coverage, and duress buttons all reduce risk and give staff a faster path to help. No one is arguing to rip them out. 

But infrastructure alone doesn't tell a staff member what to do—or how to stay calm — in the sixty seconds before a situation escalates. When employees don't feel equipped to act, the results are predictable, even in a building full of cameras and records in an EHR. Responses are inconsistent and can inadvertently escalate a situation further. Injury rates climb. And the emotional toll compounds, shift after shift. 

CPI's data backs this up at scale. One in six health care professionals, 18%, believe their staff feel very or mostly unsafe at work. And 66% of organizations still don't have an established workplace violence prevention committee with clearly defined policies. Without that structure, even a well-equipped building can feel unsafe to the people working in it. That's the real staff safety gap. 

What "Felt Safety" Actually Means in Health Care

Felt safety is the physiological state where staff genuinely feel prepared, supported, and ready to respond to a crisis. It's not just being aware that a policy exists somewhere in a binder and doesn’t come from de-escalation training once per year. 

It's the difference between compliance and readiness. Compliance is a signature on a training log. Felt safety looks different. It's a staff member walking into a room and recognizing the early signs of escalation. It's knowing exactly what to do next, without freezing, guessing, or reaching for backup they're not sure is coming.  It’s the ability to stay self-regulated and calm in the midst of a crisis moment. 

That distinction matters clinically, too. Staff who feel safe and confident are more likely to use verbal de-escalation effectively to prevent that crisis moment. That reduces how often a situation needs to escalate to physical intervention at all. 

CPI's report makes the connection explicit. Organizations with established workplace violence prevention policies and frequent training report far more confidence in staff feeling safe. Over half of "Leader" organizations, 58%, in training effectiveness are also Leaders in workplace safety feelings. Meanwhile, nearly nine in 10 "Laggard" organizations feel they have unsafe workplace environments. Training and felt safety move together.

This isn't unique to CPI's data set, either. A 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis in International Nursing Review reached a similar conclusion. Researchers pooled results across multiple controlled studies. They found a statistically significant improvement in health care professionals' confidence after workplace violence prevention training (Chung et al., 2025). Confidence isn't a soft outcome. It's a measurable, reproducible one.

How Crisis De-Escalation Training Builds Confidence

Confidence isn't innate, and it doesn't show up because someone attended a one-hour lunch-and-learn once a year. It's built through repetition, practical application, and a clear, shared framework everyone on the team understands the same way.

CPI's Nonviolent Crisis Intervention® (NCI™) training is built around that idea. It equips staff to:

  • Recognize early signs of escalation before a situation peaks
  • Apply verbal de-escalation strategies consistently, not just when things are already calm
  • Use safe disengagement techniques when a situation calls for it
  • Understand the psychology behind crisis behavior, including the role trauma plays in how someone reacts

The results show up in real facilities. At the Southwest Idaho Treatment Center, implementing CPI's NCI training led to a 28% decrease in client assaults within two years. Restraint use dropped by 66% over the same period. Facility leadership credits the change to staff having proactive de-escalation skills and stronger rapport with the people in their care. Staff retention improved too. As SWITC's administrative director put it, people are more likely to stay somewhere they feel equipped to handle what the job actually throws at them.

Felt Safety as a Leadership Responsibility

Here's the part that's easy to miss. Felt safety isn't something individual staff members are supposed to generate on their own through sheer grit. It's something organizations build. That happens through consistent training, visible leadership engagement, and a shared safety language, one that everyone from the front desk to the ED uses the same way.

BJC HealthCare's experience is a good illustration. We shared it during a recent Becker's Healthcare webinar on closing the gap between workplace violence prevention programs and frontline reality where I spoke with BJC’s Don Krohn and Gina Skjerseth. In 2024, a staff survey revealed a problem. Employees didn't consistently feel safe, heard, or valued around workplace violence. BJC's executive leadership didn't stop at approving a new policy. They built a dedicated, full-time workplace violence prevention program. They established a patient and visitor code of conduct. And they made sure public safety and clinical teams trained and taught together, instead of working in silos.

When they re-surveyed staff in 2025, scores had risen significantly. And the top request from employees wasn't fewer training requirements. It was more advanced training. That's what leadership-driven felt safety looks like in practice. It's not a one-time investment. It's a visible, ongoing commitment that staff can see and feel.

Curious how BJC built that program end to end, including their four-phase prevention framework and their code white response team? Watch the full webinar recording for the details.

There is No Substitute for Crisis De-escalation Training

Physical safeguards matter, but they can't substitute for the confidence that comes from well-designed, role-specific training. Cameras and panic buttons tell staff help is on the way. Training tells them what to do until it arrives. That's the piece that actually determines how a crisis unfolds.

More than half of your staff may feel only somewhat comfortable addressing a crisis. If so, the gap probably isn't in your infrastructure. It's in how prepared your people feel to use it.

Explore CPI's Nonviolent Crisis Intervention® training and see how it can build staff confidence across your system.

 

Sources

  1. Crisis Prevention Institute. 2025 Annual Report: Workplace Violence Prevention Training. April 2025.
  2. Crisis Prevention Institute. 2026 Annual Report: Workplace Violence Prevention Training. 2026. 

Chung, S.-Y., et al. "The Effectiveness of Workplace Violence Prevention Education Training Programs on Healthcare Professionals’ Confidence: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis." International Nursing Review, 2025.

  1. Crisis Prevention Institute. "How the Southwest Idaho Treatment Center Reduced the Need for Restraints with CPI Training." Customer Success Story.
  2. Crisis Prevention Institute & BJC HealthCare. "Closing the Gap Between Workplace Violence Prevention Programs and Frontline Reality." Becker's Healthcare Webinar, 2026.