Mitigating Potential Healthcare Violence with Training, Visitor Management, and Workforce Management Tools

Trackforce

April 9, 2020 · 6 min read

Training and certification blog apr wk 1 1

Key takeaways

Healthcare posts need training beyond the standard guard curriculum.
Crisis and crowd management, interpersonal communication, and de-escalation built for specialized posts such as the emergency room.
Consistency is what makes a visitor policy work.
A policy followed rigorously on every shift prevents more confrontation than a stricter policy applied unevenly.
Know your own history before writing the plan.
Understanding the common causes of past visitor violence, particularly in the emergency room, is what turns a generic security plan into a targeted one.
Post orders only help if they are acknowledged.
A distributed team needs a route to receive, confirm, and complete post orders, not a binder at the front desk that nobody signs.
Training records and scale are platform problems.
Trackforce keeps customizable training modules, completion records, and guard scheduling in one system, so coverage holds as healthcare demand rises.

Training Specific to Healthcare Requirements and Needs

Security guard training is essential for any industry; however, when in the healthcare space, specialized training is critical. In the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, security guards must be trained to identify COVID-19 symptoms to prevent further spreading – either internally within security staff or externally, when protecting healthcare facilities and managing visitor areas. Here’s what you can do to train your security team to become aware of healthcare staff needs, in order to mitigate risk:

Crisis management training, such as crowd management, interpersonal communication training
De-escalation training for specialized posts, like for Emergency Room (ER) security or dealing with homeless or incarcerated patients
Training to recognizing COVID-19 symptoms

Mitigating Potential Visitor Violence

Maintaining healthcare staff safety and security can go a long way towards contributing to healthcare efficiency. During this pandemic, it’s essential that security guards and personnel can mitigate visitor violence due to frustrations or lack of healthcare resources to go around, such as beds or medical equipment. Here are a few tips to improve visitor safety:

Maintain Consistency
When visitor security policies are in place, be sure that they are followed rigorously. This includes up-to-code health standards, such as maintaining social distancing and washing hands for COVID-19.

Emphasize Importance of Health Standards
Visitors can feel frustrated; for this reason, it’s important for security guards to tap into their de-escalation training to manage potentially problematic situations and to communicate the importance of abiding by health standards.

Evaluate Past Visitor Violence
As part of any security plan, it’s important to understand common causes of visitor violence, especially in areas such as the Emergency Room (ER).

Make Use of Established Visitor Management Systems
Healthcare staff have set protocols for managing patient visitors. Ensure your security guards help implement them in order to have continuity.

What Vulnerabilities Can Technology Alleviate in Terms of Healthcare Violence?

Your security team is only as good as the tools used to uphold safety. When it comes to healthcare security, there are a few things to take note.

Communication is Key for Preventing Security Silos
Communicating effectively to a distributed workforce can be a challenge. Look for a solution that allows for the creation and distribution of post orders that ensure they are understood, acknowledged, and completed with accuracy.

Maintaining Up-to-Date Training is Essential
Compliance requirements vary from different municipalities. A proper solution will allow for the creation of customizable training modules to help you ensure staff is up to date with safety and security procedures and requirements.

Ensure Your Team is Capable of Adapting and Scaling for Increased Demand
The ultimate goal of every organization is to grow and scale up. Your workforce needs a system that is adaptable and capable of handling a large number of guards while also flexible to adapt to increased healthcare security demands.

A proper workforce management system helps your team uphold violence prevention plans and acts as a foundation for mitigating potential healthcare violence.

Frequently Asked Questions

Three areas matter most: crisis and crowd management, interpersonal communication, and de-escalation tailored to specialized posts such as the emergency room or units handling patients in custody. The harder part is proving every officer on a healthcare post is current. Trackforce lets you build customizable training modules, assign them by site or post, and track completion and certification expiry, so a gap shows up before an auditor finds it.

Consistency comes from putting the policy inside the officer’s workflow rather than in a binder at the desk. Trackforce delivers post orders to the officer’s device and requires acknowledgement, so a supervisor can see who has read the current visitor procedure and who has not. When the policy changes, the update reaches every post on the next shift instead of waiting for a briefing.

No, and it should not. Most health systems already run visitor sign-in and badging through clinical or facilities systems with their own protocols. Trackforce sits alongside that: it codifies those protocols as post orders the security team actually works to, and it captures what happened when a visitor interaction escalated. The result is continuity between what the hospital decided and what the officer at the door does.

You need a baseline and a consistent record after it. That means incidents captured the same way every time, tagged by location and type, so you can compare the emergency room against the rest of the facility and this quarter against last. Trackforce reporting turns that history into a trend view, which is what lets a security leader argue for more training hours or a staffing change with evidence rather than instinct.

At minimum: post orders with acknowledgement, training and certification records, scheduling that copes with sudden coverage changes, incident capture, and reporting a compliance committee will accept. It also has to scale without a rebuild, because healthcare demand does not rise in neat increments. Trackforce covers those functions in one platform, which is what keeps a violence prevention plan operating rather than sitting in a policy folder.