Safety

Tip of the week: Know why visitors enter your facility

Hospital Safety Connection, July 22, 2010

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 Controlling how visitors enter your healthcare facility may be one of the easier components of access control. But because hospitals are generally open buildings, access control expands beyond a hospital’s entrance. Managing access to a door is easier than ensuring that once visitors are inside the facility, they are where they are supposed to be and have a reason for being there. To do that, you need staff and leadership support.

“You’re never going to have enough security people, so the staff really have to enforce your security program,” says Fredrick Roll, MA, CHPA-F, CPP, President and Principal Consultant of Healthcare Security Consultants and Roll Enterprises, Inc. in Frederick, CO. He adds that doing so might entail ensuring visitors have ID badges or requiring staff to ask visitors their purpose if they look lost. “If the staff members know it’s not being done on a regular and consistent basis, they’re not going to stick their neck out there and stop somebody because they don’t have a pass.”

For more on access control, read this month's issue of Healthcare Security Alert.



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