That risk is often manifested in our hospitals, where no less than 85,000 incidences of violent or abusive behaviour have been recorded since 1998. In response, the Health and Safety Executive has pleaded with National Health Service (NHS) Trusts to combat violence and aggression on their patch.
All well and good, but the Zero Tolerance campaign and the improvement directives that followed it smacked of a knee-jerk reaction. One seemingly born of poorly-assessed information (‘Green shoots… or dead ground?’, pp30-32).
The upshot is that in-house security managers – already hard-pressed to do their job – are spending precious time and money addressing the fear of crime and insecurity as opposed to tackling threats that have already been identified. Two of them being violence and aggressive behaviour.
In essence, the reason why babies continue to be snatched from Maternity Wards and women are subject to sexual assaults in our hospitals can be attributed to the fact that there’s no all-pervasive security culture within the NHS. The absence of any professional security direction within the Department of Health has given rise to little continuity in installing common and safe security systems.
Lack of finance is certainly an issue here. All-too-often, heavy political influences are brought to bear on public bodies like the NHS. The result? Any available funding is first directed towards patients’ medical care and equipment, and then on to the clinical staff. It’s the same old story… In the annual scramble for funding, security will often miss out.
The NHS is in a minority, being one of the few bodies in the country where there’s no security practitioner at senior level tasked with devising a blanket set of policies for all.
The industry cannot allow incorrect perceptions concerning healthcare security to remain unchallenged. If the Government expects the NHS to modernise in a bid to combat heightened risk levels, then its security culture must be subject to overhaul as part of that process.
We need a healthcare security guru. And we need one now.
