Care workers may support people whose distress, dementia, cognitive impairment or other needs can sometimes involve aggression, violence or behaviour that causes harm. Understanding that context matters. So does recognising that staff safety cannot simply be treated as “part of the job”.

There is a difficult balance in care that is sometimes discussed as though providers must choose one side or the other.

On one side is person-centred care.

Understanding the person.

Recognising distress.

Looking at communication, pain, fear, cognition, environment and unmet need.

Avoiding blame for behaviour somebody may have limited ability to control.

On the other is staff safety.

Protecting people at work.

Responding to violence, abuse or harassment.

Supporting staff after incidents.

Managing risks that may happen repeatedly.

They are not opposing aims.

A good care organisation needs to be capable of holding both.

That has become particularly timely because employment law is changing on 30 October 2026.

But the wider issue is bigger than employment law.

It is about whether an organisation can see when difficult individual events are beginning to form a pattern — and whether it can respond without losing either compassion or its responsibility to the workforce.

What changes on 30 October?

The Employment Rights Act 2025 strengthens workplace harassment protections from 30 October 2026.

Two changes are particularly relevant.

Employers will be required to take all reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment of employees.

There will also be new third-party harassment provisions. Broadly, employers may be liable where an employee is harassed in the course of their employment by a third party and the employer failed to take all reasonable steps to prevent it.

Acas explains that a third party can include somebody a worker comes into contact with through work, including a service user or healthcare patient.

That makes the change relevant to care organisations.

But it is important not to stretch that legal development further than it goes.

Harassment has a specific legal meaning.

Violence, aggression, distressed behaviour, verbal abuse and other difficult interactions experienced by care workers are not automatically harassment within the Equality Act.

They should not be collapsed into one category simply because employment law is changing.

This distinction is particularly important in adult social care.

A person living with dementia may strike out because they are frightened or confused.

Somebody with a learning disability may communicate distress through behaviour.

Pain, delirium, sensory overload, mental ill health, communication difficulties, medication or changes in someone's environment may all affect behaviour.

Intent, capacity, circumstances and the nature of the conduct matter.

The new employment-law provisions therefore should not become a reason for care providers to start labelling every difficult interaction as harassment.

But neither should the complexity of the person's needs become a reason to stop seeing what staff are experiencing.

These are two different questions:

Why might this behaviour be happening?

and:

What do we need to do to reduce the risk of somebody being harmed?

A good organisation should be able to ask both.

The workforce evidence is difficult to ignore

The Department of Health and Social Care's 2025 adult social care workforce study provides useful context.

Around 41% of respondents said they had experienced physical violence from people they cared for or supported at least once during the previous year.

Around 39% reported harassment, abuse or bullying from people they cared for or supported at least once.

The study also found harassment, abuse or bullying from other sources, including family members of people receiving care.

These survey categories are broader than the legal definition of harassment.

They should not be interpreted as saying that 39% of the adult social care workforce experienced legally actionable harassment.

What they do show is that difficult and potentially harmful experiences are a significant part of working life for a substantial part of the workforce.

DHSC also makes an important point: aggression and violence can be symptomatic of health conditions associated with care needs, including neurological conditions such as dementia.

That complexity is exactly why simplistic responses do not work.

Understanding behaviour is not the same as accepting harm

Care workers are often exceptionally good at understanding context.

They know that somebody may not mean to hurt them.

They recognise fear.

They learn people's triggers.

They adjust their approach.

They de-escalate.

They may understand that behaviour which looks aggressive to an outsider is communication from a person who cannot easily express what is wrong.

Those are important care skills.

But there is a risk that compassion gradually becomes normalisation.

“That's just what he does.”

“She doesn't mean it.”

“She's always worse at teatime.”

“He only does that with new staff.”

“You get used to it.”

Sometimes those statements demonstrate genuine understanding of the person.

Sometimes they also contain organisational information.

If somebody is repeatedly distressed at the same time of day, something may be worth understanding.

If only unfamiliar staff are being hit, induction or communication may matter.

If incidents become more frequent when staffing changes, that may be relevant.

If one worker is experiencing a disproportionate number of incidents, somebody should be curious about why.

If the same trigger is recorded repeatedly but no action changes, incident reporting has not become learning.

Understanding the behaviour should help an organisation manage it more intelligently.

It should not mean that nothing further happens.

Person-centred care and staff risk belong in the same conversation

HSE's guidance for health and social care is useful here.

Where somebody receiving care may pose a risk of violence or aggression, HSE says individual risk assessment should form part of the care-planning process and should be reviewed.

That assessment should consider the person's:

It should also connect to the reality of how the service works.

Do staff know the known triggers?

Do new or agency staff have the information they need?

Are there particular times or activities when risk increases?

Is staffing adequate for the level of risk?

Have changes in medication, health, mood or behaviour been recognised?

Is important information communicated at handover?

This is not about creating a separate “staff safety plan” that sits apart from person-centred care.

The two belong together.

The safest response for staff may also be the response that best understands and supports the person.

Repeated incidents need to become organisational information

One incident may be an isolated event.

Five similar incidents may be telling the organisation something else.

This is where provider-level visibility matters.

Imagine three members of staff are hit over several weeks.

Each event is recorded.

Each member of staff is checked.

The person's care plan is noted.

The incident forms are completed.

Individually, each process may have been followed.

But has anybody looked across the incidents?

Did they happen at a similar time?

During the same activity?

With unfamiliar staff?

After a recent change in the person's health?

In a particular part of the building?

Was the staffing position similar?

Had previous actions actually been completed?

Did anything change after the first event?

Without that wider view, an organisation can record every incident correctly while failing to recognise the pattern connecting them.

That is the difference between incident management and organisational learning.

Families and visitors matter too

Not every third party is somebody receiving care.

Care workers interact with relatives, visitors, professionals, contractors and members of the public.

Most of those relationships are positive.

Some become difficult.

A family member may be distressed, frightened or frustrated.

There may be understandable disagreement about a person's care.

But staff should not have to assume that threats, discriminatory abuse, sexual comments or repeated intimidation from somebody outside the workforce are simply part of providing a service.

The organisation needs to know when these things are happening.

Managers need to feel able to respond.

Staff need to understand how concerns can be raised.

And provider leaders should be able to see when an issue has moved beyond one difficult conversation into a recurring organisational risk.

The forthcoming third-party harassment provisions make that visibility more important.

But it should have mattered already.

Reporting only helps if something happens afterwards

The DHSC workforce study found that many incidents are reported.

That is positive.

But reporting is only the first part of learning.

Staff quickly notice the difference between:

“Please fill in an incident form.”

and:

“We have looked at what happened and this is what we are going to do.”

Sometimes no major change will be needed.

Sometimes the care plan already contains the right approach and somebody needs additional support to use it.

Sometimes a clinical review is needed.

Sometimes the environment can be changed.

Sometimes staffing or deployment needs reconsidering.

Sometimes the person involved needs a different communication approach.

Sometimes the family relationship itself needs managing.

And sometimes the organisation needs specialist advice.

The important thing is that recurring harm should not disappear into a collection of individually completed forms.

Staff need support after the event too

Good incident management should not treat the worker simply as another source of evidence.

Being hit, threatened, intimidated or repeatedly abused can affect people differently.

Some staff will want to return to work immediately.

Others may feel anxious about supporting the person again.

A worker may question whether they handled the situation badly.

New staff may lose confidence.

An experienced worker may appear completely unaffected while carrying considerably more stress than anybody realises.

A useful response can include:

This is not about treating every incident as a crisis.

It is about not treating the person providing care as invisible once the incident form has been completed.

Provider leaders need to see more than the incident count

A dashboard showing the number of incidents can be useful.

It does not necessarily tell a provider enough.

Useful questions might include:

Not every provider needs another dashboard to answer these questions.

But somebody needs enough organisational visibility to notice when the answers matter.

Staff safety is part of care quality

There can be a fear that talking strongly about workforce safety somehow moves the focus away from people receiving care.

It should not.

Staff who feel supported are better placed to remain calm.

Teams that understand risks can plan more thoughtfully.

Accurate information helps unfamiliar staff approach somebody consistently.

Learning from incidents can improve the person's experience as well as reduce harm to workers.

Stable, confident teams matter to continuity of care.

Good care does not require choosing between the safety and dignity of the person receiving support and the safety and dignity of the person providing it.

Both belong within the same system.

A useful question for provider leaders

Perhaps the useful leadership question is not simply:

“Do we have a violence and aggression policy?”

or:

“Are we ready for the employment-law change?”

It is:

“If our staff are repeatedly experiencing harm, would our organisation recognise it early enough to do something useful?”

Would the incidents connect?

Would somebody notice the pattern?

Would the manager be supported?

Would risk information reach the right staff?

Would actions be followed through?

Would the organisation learn?

And would it be able to do all of that while still understanding the person behind the behaviour?

That is the balance worth building.

How Mandersley can help

Mandersley supports independent care providers to connect information that can otherwise remain separated across incidents, workforce issues, care planning, complaints, safeguarding, management and provider oversight.

Where staff are experiencing repeated difficult or harmful situations, that can mean helping leaders see patterns, understand where responsibility sits, strengthen action follow-through and make sure organisational learning does not stop when an individual incident is closed.

The aim is not to turn complex care into a compliance exercise.

It is to help providers maintain enough visibility to support both the people receiving care and the people providing it.

Sources and further reading

Acas — Third party harassment — Employment Rights Act 2025 harassment law changes

UK Government / Department for Business and Trade — Plan to Make Work Pay and Employment Rights Act: timeline update

Department of Health and Social Care — Executive summary: work-related quality of life of the adult social care workforce in England in 2025

Health and Safety Executive — Violence in health and social care: Overview

Health and Safety Executive — Managing the risk of violence and aggression

Article note

This Insight provides general organisational commentary for independent care providers and is not employment-law advice. Harassment has a specific legal meaning, and individual circumstances may require specialist employment, legal, health and safety or clinical advice. The workforce statistics discussed above use broader survey categories covering violence, harassment, abuse and bullying and should not be interpreted as estimates of legally actionable harassment.