Occupational violence and aggression (OVA)
Occupational violence and aggression (OVA) is any incident in which a person is abused, threatened, or assaulted in circumstances arising out of their work.
OVA is the formal name for the risk most frontline teams simply call aggression: the escalating customer, the volatile patient, the threatening visitor on a home visit. It spans verbal abuse, threats, intimidation, spitting, physical assault, and gendered violence - whether from clients, patients, customers or members of the public.
Regulators across Australia, New Zealand and the UK treat OVA as a foreseeable workplace hazard, which places it squarely inside the employer's duty of care: it must be risk-assessed, controlled, and reviewed like any other hazard. Health, community services, retail and government consistently sit at the top of OVA exposure because their work is inherently public-facing.
The monitoring data reflects OVA's signature: it is immediate. Sectors with high OVA exposure raise alarms by deliberate trigger - a button pressed mid-incident - rather than by timers, and their alarms confirm as real emergencies at the highest rates after hours, when staffing is thinnest.