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Designing security into your facility

Hospital Safety Insider, February 11, 2016

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Designing security features into a new healthcare facility or renovated space from the beginning can improve safety and security, maximize utilization of human resources, and lower operational costs. Patient and employee satisfaction is also enhanced by good security designs. If patients, visitors, and staff feel safe walking from the parking or transit facilities, their confidence in the organization is bolstered and they are more able to focus on their reason for coming to your facility.

It can be easy to miss or glaze over meaningful discussion about security in the early stages of design. Often the design team and unit leaders are so focused on designing their new space that security is not seriously considered until major decisions have already been set in stone. These include stairwell location, traffic patterns, and adjacent functions that may lead to conflicting operational needs, such as placing a night foodservice operation inside the nighttime perimeter of the facility, which requires additional security control points. When security flaws are designed into a project, expensive change orders and retrofitting usually are necessary. Sometimes it is impossible to alter a design due to conflicts with life safety codes or cost-prohibitive retrofitting expenses. Add-on security features also may deter from the aesthetic value of a project, and the final project may end up costing a great deal more.

The worst case scenario occurs when appropriate security features are left out, or are "value-engineered" out, and an adverse incident occurs. At this point, the security features are added at great expense. Retrofitted security features are almost always more obvious and less effective than security features that are designed in from the early stages.

This is an excerpt from the monthly healthcare safety resource Briefings on Hospital Safety. Subscribers can read the rest of the article here. Non-subscribers can find out more about the journal, its benefits, and how to subscribe by clicking here.
 

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