Healthcare Security A Healthy Balance
The economic recession has exacerbated crime in healthcare environments, challenging practitioners to work harder to strike a balance between patient care and security.
By Diane Ritchey & Laura Stepanek
solutions, specific applications and what they wish they could have to improve the overall task. The roundtable discussion is moderated by SDM Editor, Laura
Stepanek.
picture can worsen. Healthcare workers today are dealing with more instances of identification fraud by people who seek medical services, increased cases of patients with mental health problems, and the ever-present threat of an on-site active shooter in the healthcare environment. Healthcare professionals are squeezed by so many different demands, yet they ultimately strive to achieve a healthy balance between patient care and security. Security practitioners in this sector are concerned not only about protection of patients, but sometimes about protection from patients – especially in those facilities that treat prisoners. Technology can play a role, but ultimately it is just one solution in a multi-faceted approach that also has to take into account restrained budgets. Sister publications Security and SDM brought together profes- sionals in healthcare security – five practitioners and four systems integrators – who specialize in finding solutions to the security issues in this sector. Here, they discuss the unique needs, the technology
H 4 November 2010 • Solutions By Sector • Healthcare Security
ealthcare workers are used to seeing people at their worst – illness, injury and death can cause a normally controlled situation to become unpredictable. But add to that the pressures on people who are struggling financially and the
Laura Stepanek: What are the unique security needs in healthcare facilities that you have responsibility for, and what problems do you spend the most time on to mitigate the risk? Linda Fite: Hospital security is a very unique animal. I would say that our biggest need of balancing family-patient-centered care – which is sort of a new buzzword with rules, balancing convenience with security [is] always a tough one. Access control is difficult in healthcare. Getting visitors in with their families is tough in our birthplace area. We sometimes have up to 30 people wanting to visit; it becomes very, very difficult. We deal a lot more with identification fraud, people presenting as someone else. Maybe it’s a family mem- ber or maybe it’s just a name that they made up. Getting medical records can become mixed up with that. In this economy we’re seeing a lot more people without insurance and people with mental health issues. Those are the biggest chal- lenges right now. Tony Venezia: Since Tampa General Hospital is a level one trauma center, we often see people at their worst. Unfortunately, we see families dealing with hardships every day; and people grieve in different ways and that can lead to violence on staff members. We try to train our people to recognize potential violence, de-escalate situa- tions while being compassionate, customer service ambassadors. Michael Parks: Here at Mercy Medical Center in Baltimore we
are just about completing our new hospital building and that in itself presents a lot of challenges to us. It will double the size of our cam- pus once we move in December. But some of the challenges that the other two speakers said before me are the same here in Baltimore – trying to balance a wide variety of what we feel are necessary security measures with a target rich environment for customer service is really a serious challenge for all of us. There are so many different entrances into a hospital setting, mostly because there have been a number of building projects that have attached themselves onto other buildings. When you do that there are just so many different ways that folks have access to your building, so access control really does become a major player. Here at Mercy we spent a great deal of time trying to mitigate inci- dents of theft. I think you can imagine in the downtown setting, a lot of foot traffic comes into our buildings. We do a lot of things about crime prevention with employees, and work with downtown agencies trying to mitigate these kinds of problems.
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