Violence perpetrated against employees by patients, their families, and unauthorized visitors – including estranged members of employees’ own families – tops the list of concerns and threats for healthcare security directors.
About 27.3% of women in the United States experience domestic violence, which can spill over into the workplace, said Jim Sawyer, Director of Security Services at Seattle Children’s Hospital. But there are many actions that a security director can take to support those victims, Sawyer said, which includes proactive security planning.
Hospitals and care providers added 43,000 jobs in July, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), continuing the upward trend spanning the last 12 months in which the healthcare industry added 477,000 jobs to the economy.
Because healthcare facilities typically have high numbers of visitors, an appropriate visitor system has to accommodate rapid guest check-ins, and also be unobtrusive for guests in the process.
If experiments at assisted living facilities are any indication, the future of security and hospital management more broadly will be paved with sensors in every nook and cranny as well as on all types of equipment.
As enterprise security executives working other industries know, healthcare security needs to look inward in addition to considering patients and visitors when it comes to protection strategies.
No matter lessons learned from previous incidents, healthcare facilities continue to embarrassingly report laptops and flash drives containing patient information misplaced, lost and stolen, even in the face of increased regulatory procedures demanding more and better security through the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 and the more recent Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act.
