Healthcare facilities always have been concerned with safety. After all, they’re healthcare facilities, where the sick and injured go to be treated. Germs always have been a major threat in such settings.
However, these days, threats have gone far past the viral. In Locksmith Ledger’s roundtable on healthcare security, starting on page 10, several experts note the threat of violence toward healthcare staff.
Data backs up this concern. One study by American Association of Occupational Health Nurses found that during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, 44% of nurses experienced physical violence, and 68% experienced verbal abuse. Another study by National Nurses United found that workplace violence was up more than 119% since March 2021.
The head-slapping incomprehensibility that doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers — whose job is to take care of us — would face an increased threat of workplace violence is, unfortunately, all too depressingly believable in a nation where school shootings aren’t uncommon. And as is the case with violence in schools, there’s no indication that violence in healthcare settings will vanish any time soon.
So, healthcare facilities have to beef up their security, particularly at entrances. That’s good news for locksmiths who are interested in grabbing that business. The bad news is that it might involve lots of education and a change in product technology.
Robert Massard, president of Redford Lock Security Solutions in Novi, Michigan, notes that a major issue when working in healthcare security is making sure everything passes muster.
“The healthcare industry and healthcare facilities are some of the most challenging door hardware security environments because of all the regulations — fire codes, [Americans with Disabilities Act] codes. You have HIPAA laws and on and on. It’s super-challenging,” he says.
The other thing locksmiths should get smart about is electronic access control (EAC). The increased use of EAC at entrances not only would control access to a facility or a designated area better, but it also would allow for increased screening and tracking, particularly if the EAC system was integrated with video.
Massard says that at the beginning of the pandemic, healthcare facilities — big and small — set up procedures to prevent certain people from entering the facility. The procedures dealt primarily with ensuring that visitors were free of COVID — temperature checks, questionnaires, mask checks and, later, proof of vaccination.
Those screens have grown lax over time, but that just provides an opportunity to transition from health monitoring to security monitoring. Massard suggests card access where an invalid read during a certain time of day might turn on a camera as one option — each application might require a different solution.
But what’s most necessary in this new healthcare environment is education.
“Knowledge is the key,” Massard says. “It’s overused. It’s very passe, but the more you can learn about the environment, the more you can cater solutions to it.”
