There is a sentence in the Health and Safety Executive’s current guidance that adult social care should pay very close attention to:
Health and social care employees should not accept incidents of violent or aggressive behaviour as a normal part of the job.
HSE says workers have a right to expect a safe and secure workplace. It defines work-related violence broadly as an incident in which a person is abused, threatened or assaulted in circumstances relating to their work, and it specifically warns that under-reporting remains a problem because violence and aggression can become accepted as part of working in health and social care.
The latest national workforce evidence makes that warning particularly important.
The Department of Health and Social Care’s 2025 adult social care workforce survey found that 41% of the workforce had personally experienced physical violence from somebody they cared for or supported at least once during the previous 12 months.
More than one in five of the entire workforce—22%—had experienced it three times or more.
The picture becomes more striking when service type is considered.
Among people working in residential care, 59% had experienced physical violence at least once.
And 16% of residential-care workers—approximately one in six—said they had experienced physical violence more than ten times during the year.
For workers in home care, the equivalent prevalence was 29%.
These figures should not lead to a simplistic conclusion that people receiving care are dangerous.
That would misunderstand the nature of adult social care.
Violence and aggression can arise in extraordinarily complex circumstances involving dementia, cognitive impairment, learning disability, autism, mental ill health, distress, pain, fear, trauma, communication difficulty, medication, environmental factors or changing physical health. HSE’s care-specific guidance tells providers to consider the person’s mental, emotional and physical condition, medicines, stress, previous behaviour and whether they perceive others as a threat when assessing risk.
Understanding those causes is part of good care.
But understanding why something happened is not the same as deciding that employees simply have to endure it.
That distinction should sit at the centre of provider governance.
Person-centred care and staff safety are not competing values. A strong service should be capable of protecting both.
Normalisation may be the biggest organisational risk
Adult social care contains an extraordinary degree of workforce commitment.
Care workers routinely support people through confusion, distress, grief, deterioration and behaviour that can be difficult to interpret.
That experience creates skill.
It can also create tolerance.
A worker is hit.
They are shaken but continue the shift.
A resident with dementia lashes out during personal care.
An incident form is started but the evening becomes busy.
A home-care worker is threatened during a visit but says afterwards:
“They didn’t really mean it.”
A support worker is bitten.
A colleague asks whether they are okay.
The answer is yes.
Everyone carries on.
Individually, each decision can feel compassionate and pragmatic.
Across an organisation, they can create a dangerous culture in which repeated exposure becomes ordinary.
HSE says there is a high level of under-reporting of violence and aggression in health and social care because many workers accept incidents as part of their job.
The national care-workforce survey paints a slightly more encouraging picture of reporting behaviour: 77% of workers who experienced physical violence said they reported their most recent incident themselves, while another 12% said a colleague reported it.
But even where incidents are being recorded, another question remains:
What happens after the report?
A reporting system can capture 100 incidents without reducing the likelihood of the 101st.
The provider needs to know whether information is being turned into:
changes in care;
changes in staffing;
better understanding of triggers;
different environments;
additional clinical input;
updated risk controls;
or greater support for the employee.
An incident log is evidence that something happened.
It is not evidence that the organisation learned from it.
“Zero tolerance” needs a care-sector definition
There is understandable appeal in describing workplace violence as a zero-tolerance issue.
But in adult social care, that phrase needs careful interpretation.
Zero tolerance should not mean zero understanding.
It should not mean automatically blaming or criminalising a person living with dementia, significant cognitive impairment, severe distress or another condition affecting their behaviour.
Nor should it mean abandoning somebody because their care has become difficult.
Adult social care exists precisely because people sometimes need sophisticated support when ordinary environments cannot meet their needs.
The stronger meaning is this:
Zero tolerance for organisational complacency about foreseeable harm.
The provider can understand that a resident struck somebody because they were frightened.
It can simultaneously ask whether staff understood the trigger.
It can recognise that somebody’s behaviour communicates distress while still examining whether the environment, staffing or care plan could have reduced that distress.
It can avoid blaming the individual while refusing to blame the worker either.
Skills for Care’s guidance on distressed behaviour and Positive Behaviour Support places emphasis on understanding what is driving behaviour, including life history, physical health and emotional need, rather than treating behaviour simply as a problem to suppress.
That provides a better starting point.
The goal is not:
How do we control this person?
It is:
What is happening here, what is the person communicating, what creates risk, and how can we make the situation safer for everyone?
A bruise is not the beginning of the risk assessment
HSE requires employers to assess significant risks to workers and implement effective controls, including measures to prevent and manage work-related violence. It specifically says that completing the assessment itself does not reduce violence—the actions taken afterwards are what matter.
In social care, that means risk assessment must start before the incident where reasonably foreseeable, not after somebody has been injured.
And one generic workplace-violence assessment is unlikely to explain the complete care risk.
There are at least two interlocking perspectives.
The first is the service-level risk.
What happens in this home, branch or supported-living service?
Are employees working alone?
Are there areas where help is difficult to summon?
Do staff regularly work with people whose needs can result in distressed behaviour?
Are staffing levels adequate?
Are new workers given enough information?
Are agency workers entering unfamiliar environments?
Is the physical layout helping or hindering safe care?
The second is the person-specific risk.
HSE’s health and social care guidance says individual assessment should form part of care planning where a person presents a risk of violence or aggression. It specifically highlights changes in mental or physical state, medication, behaviour or mood, and warns that particular attention may be needed when new or agency staff are involved or a new person is admitted.
That is an important operational point.
Violence is often discussed retrospectively as though the event began at the moment of physical contact.
In reality, the pathway may have started hours, days or weeks earlier.
A person may be experiencing:
pain;
infection;
constipation;
fear;
sleep deprivation;
communication difficulty;
medication effects;
sensory overload;
or disruption to a familiar routine.
The organisation that learns to identify those precursors is not simply reducing staff risk.
It is improving care.
Repeated violence should trigger curiosity, not resignation
One of the strongest findings in the 2025 workforce study is not just prevalence.
It is persistence.
The longitudinal analysis found that workers who experienced frequent physical violence, harassment, abuse or bullying during the earlier survey remained substantially more likely to report it again later. The research also found that experiencing or witnessing violence, harassment, abuse or bullying from people receiving care was associated with a greater likelihood of changing employer or leaving adult social care.
That makes repeated incidents more than a health-and-safety concern.
They can become a workforce sustainability concern.
A provider experiencing recurring violence may see the downstream consequences through:
sickness;
absence;
turnover;
agency reliance;
recruitment difficulty;
loss of experienced workers;
lower morale;
and weaker continuity for the people receiving care.
That chain matters.
The incident itself may last 30 seconds.
The workforce consequence can last months.
When a location repeatedly reports similar incidents, the leadership question should therefore become:
What are we learning from the pattern that we could not learn from the individual event?
Does violence concentrate around one time of day?
One form of personal care?
One environment?
Particular staffing combinations?
Agency workers?
Medication changes?
One resident’s changing condition?
Periods of low staffing?
Noise?
Mealtimes?
Transitions?
The organisation needs enough data to move from incident management to pattern recognition.
That is where reporting begins to create value.
Staffing is a violence-control measure
Workforce numbers are frequently discussed through care delivery.
Are there enough people to complete the required support?
Violence risk adds another dimension.
HSE says employers should ensure sufficient staffing levels to manage foreseeable violence and respond when incidents occur. Its care-specific guidance says managers setting staffing levels need enough suitably trained staff to cope with foreseeable aggression.
This is not the same as saying every person who sometimes becomes distressed requires additional permanent staffing.
It means risk should influence deployment.
Consider a service supporting someone who requires two workers during a particular intervention because their distress can escalate rapidly.
If the rota technically contains enough staff overall but both experienced employees are deployed elsewhere at the critical time, the service can still be exposed.
Skills mix matters.
Experience matters.
Familiarity matters.
The ability to summon help matters.
And, crucially, the care plan and workforce plan need to describe the same reality.
A provider cannot say:
“Two staff are required to manage this safely”
while operating a rota that repeatedly makes two staff unavailable.
The risk assessment then becomes theoretical.
Agency staffing can change the risk even when headcount does not
This deserves particular attention in care homes.
HSE specifically identifies new and agency workers as circumstances requiring additional care where people may present a risk of violence or aggression.
There is a good reason.
An agency worker may be highly competent.
They may also not know:
the person’s communication;
early warning signs;
known triggers;
preferred de-escalation approach;
how close to stand;
which phrases increase distress;
what usually happens before escalation;
or which staff member has the strongest relationship.
Those details can be more important than a generic training certificate.
The provider therefore needs a way of turning person-specific knowledge into information somebody unfamiliar with the service can use.
That is a care-planning issue.
A handover issue.
A digital-record issue.
And a safety issue.
If safe support depends entirely on permanent employees “just knowing” the person, staff turnover and agency use expose the weakness immediately.
Training needs to match the risk, not the course catalogue
Training is another area where apparent assurance can differ from practical assurance.
A service can show that every employee attended violence-and-aggression training.
HSE’s guidance asks for something more proportionate.
Training should reflect the actual work identified through risk assessment, cover warning signs, communication, de-escalation and local procedures, and where serious physical aggression is foreseeable may need to include additional physical-intervention skills. HSE also says temporary and agency workers should receive training appropriate to their exposure.
This should lead providers away from one generic question:
“Has the employee completed challenging-behaviour training?”
towards:
“Does this worker have the capability required for the actual risks within this service?”
A worker supporting people living with dementia may need a very different practical knowledge base from somebody supporting a person with autism whose distress has particular sensory triggers.
A lone home-care worker has another set of needs.
A worker expected to use restrictive interventions in exceptional circumstances requires still greater governance.
NICE’s violence-and-aggression guidance includes prevention, de-escalation, staff training and post-incident review across relevant health, mental health, social care and community settings.
Good training should therefore change what happens before the incident—not merely how the employee reacts once violence has begun.
Lone working changes consequence even when it does not change probability
Home care and community support introduce another important risk model.
HSE makes a useful distinction: working alone does not automatically mean violence is more likely, but it can make the worker more vulnerable because nearby support is not available. Employers need to assess lone-working risk, maintain contact, provide appropriate training and have arrangements to respond to incidents.
This changes the provider’s practical questions.
What happens if a worker feels unsafe after entering the home?
Can they leave without feeling they have failed the person?
How do they summon assistance discreetly?
Does anybody know that a visit has overrun unexpectedly?
Does the provider have accurate location and visit information?
Are previous threats visible before another employee attends?
How does an evening or weekend worker reach management?
A panic device or lone-worker app may be useful in some settings.
But technology cannot compensate for a care package that has been commissioned as lone working when the risk assessment says otherwise.
Again, the operating model has to match the documented risk.
Reporting needs to be psychologically safe
There is another reason incidents may become normalised.
Staff can fear what reporting will imply.
Will they be blamed for “not managing” the person?
Will somebody say they should have de-escalated better?
Will the resident be labelled?
Will the worker be treated as weak?
Will reporting create several forms and no meaningful support?
A strong reporting culture needs to separate learning from automatic blame.
The organisation should be capable of asking simultaneously:
What happened to the worker?
What was happening for the person receiving care?
What did the environment contribute?
What information did staff have?
What did they not have?
What worked?
What failed?
What should change?
HSE tells employers to involve workers in understanding violence risk and use incident records to identify hazards and patterns.
This makes frontline reporting a source of operational intelligence.
The worker who experienced the event may understand aspects of the trigger, environment and response that no manager reading an incident form later can see.
Their evidence matters.
Aftercare is part of the control system
Violence does not end when the immediate incident ends.
Physical injury may be obvious.
Psychological effect can be harder to see.
HSE notes that violence can lead to physical injury and work-related stress with potentially serious and long-term impacts on physical and mental health. It specifically tells employers to support workers who have experienced violence.
A worker may finish the shift and appear outwardly fine.
They may then experience:
anxiety returning to the same service;
sleep disturbance;
loss of confidence;
fear during similar situations;
or reluctance to support the same person.
This is where the phrase:
“They said they were okay”
is not always sufficient organisational assurance.
Post-incident support should be proportionate.
Sometimes that means a conversation, reassurance and learning.
Sometimes medical support is appropriate.
Sometimes absence or temporary adjustment may be necessary.
Sometimes supervision needs to explore confidence before the worker returns to the same situation.
A provider that supports employees properly after difficult events is not only meeting a workforce need.
It is also helping them return to care safely.
Serious incidents can create statutory reporting obligations
Not every act of aggression is reportable to HSE.
But some workplace-violence injuries fall within RIDDOR.
HSE’s current guidance says acts of non-consensual violence at work can be reportable where they result in death, specified serious injury or a physical injury causing the worker to be unable to perform their normal work duties for more than seven days.
This matters because providers can become familiar with recording incidents through care-governance systems while overlooking the separate health-and-safety question.
The CQC incident record is not the same as RIDDOR.
An internal HR report is not the same as RIDDOR.
A safeguarding response is not the same as RIDDOR.
One event can engage several governance processes for different reasons.
The provider needs enough clarity to identify when escalation extends beyond its own incident system.
The insurance question begins with employer risk—not a policy recommendation
This feature sits within our insurance coverage because workplace violence can have financial and liability consequences for care providers.
But there is an important regulatory boundary.
Care Circle Network does not determine which policy an individual care provider should buy, recommend levels of cover, compare insurers or decide whether a particular event would be insured.
The FCA’s insurance-distribution guidance distinguishes general information from activities that can become regulated when they involve recommendations on the merits of particular insurance contracts, arranging or materially assisting with policy performance.
What we can explain is the broader risk framework.
In Great Britain, most employers are legally required to hold Employers’ Liability insurance against liability for injury or disease sustained by employees arising from their employment. Government guidance states the compulsory minimum is £5 million and the insurance must be placed with an authorised insurer, subject to specified exemptions.
That does not mean every workplace-violence event automatically creates an employers’ liability claim.
Nor does it mean the presence of insurance determines whether an employer met its health-and-safety duties.
The underlying legal, factual and policy position will depend on the circumstances.
The more useful provider question is:
Does our description of workforce risk, incident experience and control environment accurately reflect the organisation we actually operate?
That is governance.
Insurance should never become the control measure
This distinction deserves emphasis.
Insurance can transfer aspects of financial risk.
It cannot make an unsafe staffing model safe.
It cannot assess the person.
It cannot identify distress.
It cannot train the worker.
It cannot change a care plan.
It cannot make an alarm work.
It cannot support somebody after an assault.
The health-and-safety duty exists independently.
HSE requires employers to assess the risk and implement effective controls.
That means the order of thinking should be:
understand → prevent → manage → support → learn → then understand the financial and insurance implications.
Not:
we have insurance, therefore the risk is managed.
This is the same principle we have applied to cyber risk.
Risk transfer and operational resilience perform different jobs.
Claims evidence and good workforce governance often look remarkably similar
Imagine a worker is seriously injured during an incident and a liability allegation later arises.
A great deal may turn on the factual history.
What did the provider know about the risk?
Was it foreseeable?
Was the person’s care plan current?
Had similar incidents occurred?
Were they reviewed?
What controls were introduced?
Was staffing appropriate?
Did the worker receive relevant information and training?
Were agency workers briefed?
Had the person’s needs or medication changed?
Was the response consistent with the plan?
What happened afterwards?
Those are questions a regulator, lawyer, insurer or investigator may ask.
But they are also exactly the questions good provider leadership should already be asking to improve care.
This is why claims readiness should never become an artificial paperwork exercise.
The best evidence is usually the evidence created naturally by a service that was genuinely managing the risk well.
A pattern of incidents can become underwriting information as well as care information
Insurance relevance becomes more obvious where incidents repeat.
A provider may see rising:
staff injuries;
sickness;
RIDDOR reports;
claims;
or legal correspondence.
Those patterns may matter to an insurer or authorised intermediary seeking to understand the organisation’s changing risk.
Care Circle Network cannot determine what information is material to a particular policy or what an insurer should do with it.
But commercial providers should be conscious that their operational history and risk-control environment are not separate from the insurance picture.
If significant workplace risk has changed, provider leadership should know that it has changed.
Policy-specific questions can then be raised through the appropriate authorised insurance route rather than discovered only after a serious event.
Care Circle Network Intelligence Insight
One workforce statistic cannot explain 30,000 different care environments
Care Circle Network’s Provider Intelligence Observatory gives us an important perspective on the national violence figures.
The Observatory covers more than 30,000 care-related locations and distinguishes between different service models, including nursing and non-nursing care homes, domiciliary care and supported living. It also identifies the populations services are registered to support, including dementia, mental health needs, learning disability or autism, older people, younger adults and people with physical disabilities.
That matters because workforce violence should never be understood through a crude national risk label.
The operating context of a nursing home supporting people with advanced dementia is different from a domiciliary-care branch.
A supported-living service working with adults with learning disabilities or autism operates differently again.
A small independent care home has a different management structure from a multi-site provider with central health-and-safety and quality teams. The Observatory reflects that breadth across independent, small-group and larger provider environments.
But an important boundary has to be preserved.
Care Circle Network does not infer that an individual person, diagnosis, service type or provider presents a violence risk because of the public information held within the Observatory.
A dementia specialism does not establish violent behaviour.
A mental-health registration does not establish violent behaviour.
Learning disability or autism does not establish violent behaviour.
And a residential service cannot be classified as high risk simply because the national survey shows higher average exposure in residential care.
The provider-specific question depends on the person, workforce, environment, history and controls.
That distinction is central to how the Provider Intelligence Observatory should be used.
The intelligence can help us understand where different governance conversations matter.
It should never become a tool for stigmatising the people receiving care.
Residential care deserves particular leadership attention
The national evidence does, however, justify closer examination at sector level.
The finding that 59% of residential-care workers experienced physical violence at least once—and 16% more than ten times—is too substantial to treat as an occupational footnote.
It suggests that staff safety should sit alongside:
staffing;
medicines;
falls;
safeguarding;
infection control;
and other core quality measures
within provider governance.
Boards should know whether incidents are increasing.
Whether they concentrate in particular homes.
Whether the same employees are being injured repeatedly.
Whether sickness follows.
Whether staffing arrangements changed.
Whether agency dependence affects exposure.
And whether the organisation can demonstrate learning.
Those are not questions designed to blame people receiving care.
They are questions designed to make the care environment work better.
Home care cannot be overlooked simply because prevalence is lower
The survey found a substantially lower prevalence in home care—29% compared with 59% in residential care.
That is still nearly three in ten workers in the survey.
And home care carries a distinctive feature:
the worker may be alone.
HSE says lone workers can be more vulnerable during violent incidents because help is not immediately nearby.
That can make a lower-frequency event extremely significant when it occurs.
Providers need to understand:
who is attending;
where;
what previous information exists;
whether somebody can raise an alarm;
and what the response looks like if a worker needs to withdraw.
Home care should therefore not copy the care-home violence model.
It needs its own.
The incident should change the care plan where the evidence demands it
Perhaps the most important discipline is closing the loop.
If an incident reveals something new about the person’s needs, support should change.
The behaviour may indicate:
pain;
new cognitive deterioration;
fear;
an environmental trigger;
a problem with communication;
or that the current care approach no longer works.
HSE says individual risk assessment should be reviewed where people’s mental or physical state, medication, behaviour or mood changes, and workers exposed to the risk need to understand triggers and preventive measures reflected in the person’s care plan.
That turns staff safety into quality improvement.
The worker’s incident report becomes information about the person.
And information about the person becomes better care.
That is the outcome providers should be aiming for.
The worker’s experience should also change the organisational plan
The same loop applies in the other direction.
If the employee was unable to summon help, change the response arrangement.
If the environment trapped them, review the environment.
If handover omitted a known trigger, improve handover.
If an agency worker did not receive essential information, redesign agency induction.
If staffing was insufficient, reassess deployment.
If the control in the care plan did not work, stop treating it as a control merely because it is written down.
One incident may be unpredictable.
A recurring incident involving the same known weakness is increasingly difficult to describe that way.
The provider’s responsibility is not to guarantee that no employee will ever face aggression.
That would be unrealistic in some care contexts.
The responsibility is to identify foreseeable risk and control it reasonably and effectively.
That is a much more credible standard.
What senior leaders should be seeing
The board does not need every individual incident form.
It does need a coherent view of risk.
The strongest governance would connect:
frequency;
severity;
location;
service type;
worker absence;
RIDDOR;
repeat events;
training;
staffing;
care-plan changes;
and corrective actions.
It should also distinguish between reporting rising because the organisation has become more open and reporting rising because harm is genuinely increasing.
A sudden increase in incidents after a “report everything” campaign may actually indicate stronger culture.
That is why numbers need narrative.
Good governance asks:
What changed, why, what did we do, and did it work?
Ten questions care-provider leaders should now ask
- Do workers in our organisation genuinely believe that violence and aggression should be reported, or do some still regard it as part of the job?
- Which services, shifts, activities and circumstances account for the greatest exposure?
- Do person-specific assessments identify known triggers, early warning signs and effective de-escalation approaches clearly enough for unfamiliar workers to use them?
- Does the rota provide the staffing and skills that our own assessments say are required?
- Are agency and new workers receiving enough information before entering situations where aggression is foreseeable?
- Can lone workers withdraw, summon help and obtain timely management support when they feel unsafe?
- After an incident, do we support the worker and reassess the person’s needs—or simply close the incident form?
- Are repeated events producing identifiable changes in care, staffing, environment or clinical involvement?
- Are RIDDOR and other applicable reporting duties being considered separately from internal care reporting?
- Does our wider risk and insurance information accurately reflect what our workforce is experiencing and the controls we have put in place?
That final question is where the insurance conversation properly begins.
Not with a recommendation about what to buy.
With an accurate understanding of the organisation.
Safer staff and better care are the same agenda
There is a temptation to frame workplace violence as a conflict of interests.
Protect the worker, or protect the person receiving care.
That is the wrong choice.
A frightened, injured or unsupported workforce cannot provide consistently excellent care.
A person whose distress is repeatedly escalating into violence is not experiencing good care either.
Both outcomes tell the provider that something needs understanding.
The response needs compassion in both directions.
For the person receiving support:
What is happening?
What need is not being met?
What is triggering distress?
What could make care safer and less restrictive?
For the employee:
What happened?
What support do you need?
What information or staffing would have helped?
What needs to change before you face that situation again?
That is not softness.
It is serious risk management.
Violence at work is not part of the job
The latest workforce evidence should change the conversation.
Forty-one per cent of the adult social care workforce surveyed had experienced physical violence from people they supported in the previous year.
For residential care, the figure was 59%.
One in six residential-care workers reported experiencing physical violence more than ten times.
Those numbers are too large to hide inside the phrase:
“It’s care. These things happen.”
Yes, some incidents may remain difficult to prevent completely.
Yes, some behaviour arises from conditions and distress that require empathy rather than blame.
Yes, adult social care workers choose to support people through difficult circumstances.
None of that turns violence into an ordinary term of employment.
HSE’s position could scarcely be clearer: health and social care workers should not accept violence and aggression as a normal part of the job.
Providers should take that seriously.
Not by making services defensive.
Not by stigmatising people.
Not by introducing unnecessary restrictions.
But by building better understanding around the person, better protection around the worker and better evidence around the organisation.
Assess the real risk.
Recognise distress earlier.
Staff the service appropriately.
Give workers the skills and information they need.
Make it safe to report.
Support people after incidents.
Learn from repetition.
And make sure the organisation’s wider governance—including the information underlying its insurance relationships—keeps pace with the reality of the work being carried out.
Because accepting violence as “part of care” ultimately fails everyone.
It fails the worker who is injured.
It fails colleagues asked to absorb the same risk.
It fails the provider that loses experienced people.
And it fails the person receiving care if repeated distress continues without the service understanding why.
Violence at work is not part of the job.
Understanding it, reducing it and responding better when it occurs is part of running a safe care service.
Frequently Asked Questions
How common is physical violence against adult social care workers?
DHSC’s 2025 workforce survey found that 41% of respondents experienced physical violence from someone they cared for or supported at least once during the previous 12 months. Twenty-two per cent experienced it three times or more.
Is violence more common in residential care?
In the same survey, 59% of workers in residential care reported physical violence at least once, compared with 29% in home care. Sixteen per cent of residential-care workers reported experiencing it more than ten times during the year.
Is violence simply an unavoidable part of care work?
HSE explicitly says health and social care employees should not accept violent or aggressive behaviour as a normal part of the job and that employers and employees should work together to reduce it.
What are employers expected to do?
Employers must assess significant risks to workers, including work-related violence, and implement effective controls. HSE guidance covers staffing, working environments, lone working, training, de-escalation, person-specific risk assessment, reporting and worker support.
Does every violent incident need to be reported under RIDDOR?
No. HSE says certain work-related acts of non-consensual violence become reportable when they result in death, specified serious injury or a physical injury that prevents the worker carrying out normal duties for more than seven days.
Why is this an insurance issue?
Workplace injury can create liability and financial exposure. Most employers in Great Britain are required to maintain Employers’ Liability insurance against liability for employee injury or disease arising from employment. The existence or outcome of any particular insurance claim depends on the circumstances and relevant policy and is not something Care Circle Network assesses.
Does Care Circle Network recommend a particular insurance solution?
No. This feature is general editorial information about workforce risk, employer responsibilities and insurance-related context. It does not recommend an insurer, policy, limit, excess or course of action.
Care Circle Network Intelligence Insight
This feature has also been shaped by Care Circle Network’s Provider Intelligence Observatory, our sector-wide intelligence capability spanning more than 30,000 care-related locations and bringing together service model, provider structure, registered activities, population specialisms, provider scale, estate context and wider operational intelligence. The Observatory helps us understand how workforce-risk questions can differ between residential, nursing, home-care and supported-living environments; it is not used to infer violence risk from a diagnosis, service-user group or service type, and provider-specific risk requires direct evidence and qualification.
Editorial note
This feature provides general editorial information about workplace violence, health and safety, provider risk and commercial insurance context.
It does not constitute insurance, legal, health-and-safety or financial advice; a personal recommendation; an insurance demands-and-needs assessment; or an assessment of the suitability of any insurance contract.
Care Circle Network does not recommend an insurer, intermediary, policy, limit, excess or form of cover. Policy terms and claims outcomes vary. Provider-specific insurance questions should be considered with an appropriately authorised insurance intermediary or insurer, and legal or health-and-safety questions with the relevant qualified professional.
The FCA’s guidance distinguishes general information from regulated activities including recommending particular insurance contracts or undertaking certain arranging or claims-assistance activities.
Editorial sources
This feature draws principally on the Department of Health and Social Care’s Work-Related Quality of Life of the Adult Social Care Workforce in England in 2025, published in July 2026, including its findings on physical violence, service-setting differences, reporting, workforce wellbeing and retention.
The employer-duty and prevention sections draw on the Health and Safety Executive’s current violence and aggression guidance for health and social care, including its position that violence should not be accepted as part of the job, requirements around risk assessment, staffing, training, lone working, incident learning and RIDDOR.
The person-centred prevention approach also reflects current Skills for Care and NICE material on distressed behaviour, Positive Behaviour Support, identifying triggers, de-escalation and preventing escalation within social care settings.
The insurance context draws on GOV.UK and HSE Employers’ Liability guidance and the FCA’s PERG 5 guidance on insurance distribution activities.
