Protecting frontline workers from aggression and violence is a top priority, writes Darren Chalmers-Stevens, Group Chief Operating Officer & Managing Director, CriticalArc.

Few can doubt that the verbal and physical abuse of healthcare workers is getting worse and this is making it harder to recruit and retain staff.

To succeed, organizations are having to look beyond traditional solutions, which have failed to solve the problem; they are looking beyond the hospital environment too, because many frontline healthcare staff don’t work in hospitals. They are on call in local communities, in clinics and neighborhood practices, pharmacies and dentists, peoples’ homes and in the case of paramedics, literally out on the road.

Those staff are not helped by protective measures that are focused solely on physical premises and that end at the hospital boundary.

So, it’s good news that we are starting to see fresh thinking, as healthcare providers put into practice the lessons from another sector that has made great strides in recent years to protect extended communities of potentially vulnerable people working across complex sites with porous boundaries – higher education. Rather than continuing to rely on reactive technologies such as CCTV or focusing investment on protecting physical premises with access control, they are focusing on improved engagement and better communications tools that let people call for help the moment they need it, wherever they are.  

As a result, they are finding a more effective answer to the question: how do you keep your people safe and also make sure they feel safe? Both matter because a sense of vulnerability can affect staff performance as well as turnover.

This new approach is gathering momentum just at the right time. It’s needed now more than ever.

Violence in a healthcare setting

As well as having harmful consequences for those involved, violence and the threat of violence impacts the standards of care that patients receive.

The link between aggression and poorer staff performance is clear. Every time a healthcare worker is subjected to violence or threats, their mental wellbeing, morale and ability to do their job suffers.

Even when a member of staff appears to deal with an incident and shrug it off – or worse, when a work culture develops that accepts a certain level aggression as ‘part of the job’ – the harmful effects will accumulate.

We know that most healthcare professionals are caring and committed individuals dedicated to their work. However, over time, even the greatest dedication to work will be eroded if someone regularly feels unsafe or anxious and particularly if they get little support from their employer.

Most will find work elsewhere, where they feel better cared for. Or they will leave the profession entirely.

The result is an increase is staff absences, more staff resignations, more experienced medics opting for early retirement and a costly recruitment crisis that affects the whole sector. Healthcare providers are routinely forced to recruit staff from overseas (a policy that can have its own drawbacks, not least the fact that it exports skills shortages from one country to another).

There are many factors behind the rise in aggression in healthcare settings, many of which appear related to increased levels of stress, depression and mental health issues in society generally. Unfortunately, with economic pressures growing, those problems are likely to get worse.

We also see worrying negative cycles occurring – the more pressure medical teams come under, the more over-stretched services can become and the more there are delays or failures in providing treatment. This can all result in patients and family members becoming frustrated, frightened and confrontational.

Longer waiting times also lead to more frustration. One hospital security manager told me about a patient with a known history of mental health difficulties who had been kept waiting so long for appropriate treatment, that eventually his self-control snapped. It then took seven clinical staff and four members of the security team over an hour to de-escalate the situation. More stress, more clinical time wasted.

Potential solutions

Despite the current problems, there are grounds for hope. Pioneering hospitals and healthcare providers are implementing more effective ways to safeguard staff and ensure that they feel safer too. We are seeing improved security standards through innovation – not by repeating the traditional strategies of investing in more cameras, more access control and more security staff, but by force-multiplying their resources with new technologies.

For example, how do you guarantee that medical staff can call for help quickly, wherever they are and be confident of a rapid response every time?

The answer is a new breed of unified solution that guarantees protection to all staff across an organization that’s centrally managed, monitored and paid for and that works in all environments regardless of phone signal, site geography and building layout.

Centralized solutions are important because when responsibility for lone worker safety is left with individual department heads – managers who may be effective at their jobs, but who are not risk or security specialists – standards of protection are usually compromised. It’s only natural that line managers will focus most of their attention and resources on what they see as their core responsibilities.

Challenges with traditional approaches

The result of this fragmented responsibility is usually an inconsistent approach, with some lone workers protected better than others, some not protected at all and the organization as a whole failing to live up to its duty of care.

Any system whose costs are calculated on a traditional, device-based ‘per-person, per-month’ basis, has an in-built disincentive: managers struggling to balance their budgets will be forced to decide who gets enhanced safety and who doesn’t.

Making this choice is not a responsibility that should be weighing on any manager’s shoulders, particularly if they are not trained in risk assessment.

What’s more, too often even those users who are issued with a traditional, standalone worker’s device often report that they leave it in the drawer or at home. By contrast, their mobile phone never leaves their side. If they forget their phone, they turn round and go and get it.

Lone worker protection is one big challenge. How can you also make it easy for every staff member to report general concerns or send anonymous ‘tips’ if they see something that doesn’t look right? How can you automate your systems so that all such reports are handled efficiently and logged automatically, so that they can be dealt with proactively, audited and reviewed?

These are important functions that can’t be provided by traditional fixed-point alarms, real-time location systems (RTLS), surveillance cameras or physical security measures.

RTLS solutions, which rely on remote networks, are expensive to implement – across an entire hospital site, they are prohibitively so. While they may have a place in some settings, on their own they are of limited value; when you press the button all that happens is an alert is raised, but little else.

You get no real time coordination and response and no context about what sort of help is required.

Without two-way communications, information can’t be shared between control rooms and people calling for help – a significant disadvantage in active incidents with no lone worker functions either.

Forwards thinking

So, it’s good news that healthcare providers are starting to adopt more function rich, unified platforms instead of siloed systems – technology that solves multiple problems, that is more affordable and that truly makes a difference.

As adoption spreads, as it now is, this will protect and give confidence to the frontline health workers who are working hard to maintain services in the face of rising demand.

This article was originally published in the January edition of Security Journal Americas. To read your FREE digital edition, click here.