Explainer
Slips, trips, and falls
Spilled fluids, rushed halls, awkward shoes, and a cable on the floor still put health workers on the ground — sometimes on the same shift as a lift injury or a needlestick.
In short
Falls, slips, and trips are a major event in the U.S. workplace-injury record. In hospitals and nursing homes the floor is often wet, crowded, or poorly lit at night. In home care, the “workplace” may be a bathroom or a dark driveway.
What the official numbers show
The January 2026 SOII news release lists contact incidents and overexertion as the two largest DART event groups in private industry for 2023–2024, with 860,050 contact-incident DART cases. Falls are classified separately in BLS event tables. This page does not invent a health-care-only fall rate from those all-industry totals.
Settings with a lot of walking, night work, and hurried transfers — hospitals (5.1), nursing and residential care (5.5), and ambulance services (5.9) in 2024 — carry the overall burden in which falls are one important piece.
Source: BLS news release USDL-26-0101, January 22, 2026; BLS SOII Table 1, 2024.