Home

  • Home
    • » e-Newsletters

What to do when an incident happens at your hospital

Healthcare Security Weekly, April 18, 2004

Part of being a security director is handling incidents gone array in your facility. Since you never know when or if something might happen in your facility, it's important to prepare your response.

Picking up the pieces after negative press in your facility is always a challenge. Security consultant Fredrick Roll, CHPA-F, CPP, president of Roll Enterprises, Inc. in Morrison, CO, offers the following advice for responding to a negative incident:

  • Stay calm.
  • Don't make any direct statements to media without discussing and creating a strategy with public relations and administration. "If you get too defensive and divulge information that shouldn't be given out, you put your job in jeopardy," Roll says.
  • Avoid cover-ups. As part of a strategy, openly discuss the facts of the situation, as much as you can.
  • Focus on what you learned from the situation and the actions the hospital will take to ensure it will never happen again. "The minute after something happens, history can't change and it becomes what you can do from this point on," Roll says.
  • Take proactive measures to evaluate a specific incident and develop a counteractive plan.

The biggest challenge in moving forward is reestablishing confidence in the security department. "We're known as a necessary evil because we're a cost department taking money away from the institution," Roll says. "In some instances, security is not looked at as a direct value until something happens and then the question is, 'Why didn't we have more security persons?' "

To ensure that security doesn't get a bad rap, focus on assessments and asking for what you need.

"You can never guarantee that a security incident will not occur," Roll says. "The best thing that you can do is look at what has happened in other hospitals and do an assessment of your own facility. Then, develop a program based on that information."
 
As a security director, the assessment will allow you to ask for what you need. Then, Roll says directors can't do a lot themselves but they can put forth recommendations which may keep things from happening in the future.

Most Popular