Hospital security has always been a major concern for the healthcare industry as it is vitally important to keep patients safe while still providing a comfortable environment that is conducive to reducing stress and promoting healing. It is also imperative that the public has confidence that when they visit a hospital, they will be kept safe.

Although not common occurrences, when people hear stories in the news of babies being stolen from nurseries, switched at birth, or of a sexual assault that resulted in a vegetative patient giving birth, it reduces their confidence in the entire healthcare industry.

While infant abductions are not common, 47% of infant abductions in the U.S. occur in hospitals with the majority of those infants (58%) taken directly from their mother’s hospital room.

Even one child taken from a hospital is too many.

Fortunately, most hospitals have put systems in place that will set off an alarm if an infant with a band is taken into an elevator. There are also identification solutions that can pull up a photo of those allowed into the NICU or Labor and Delivery areas and display it on a screen so that only those who should have access actually do. These and other preventative measures help ensure the safety of these tiniest patients.

Medications, specifically who has access to them, are another major hospital security concern. Drug diversion, which refers to the transfer of controlled substances from a lawful to an unlawful channel, most often occurs with people working in the healthcare industry.

With the growing opioid crisis, it is imperative that these types of drugs are kept under the strictest controls, limiting access to only specific employees and closely monitoring how they are dispensed and disposed of in order to reduce theft from staff or visitors.

As the administrator of a hospital, it is your job to take hospital security very seriously, putting solutions in place to ensure the security of your facility, as well as your patients’ safety, while helping to build their trust in the healthcare industry as a whole. Creating a safe environment will also enable your doctors, nurses, and other staff to feel comfortable at work, allowing them to do their job without having to worry about who’s roaming the halls or whether someone is accessing medications that they shouldn’t.

Hospital Security Begins at the Registration Desk

Hospitals are busy places. There are patients coming in for both scheduled procedures and appointments as well as emergencies. Many of these patients will have visitors. There are doctors, nurses, and staff coming and going. There are EMTs, police, and security personnel. There are delivery people, service people, and other vendors. Regardless of who comes into your facility or for what reason, having a simple yet effective identification and registration process is easy with the right tools.

Visitor Tracking Solutions

Hospitals receive countless numbers of visitors and vendors throughout the day and night, so it’s easy to understand why knowing who is coming and going is paramount to securing your facility. OpenTech’s PeopleTrack Visitor Management (VM) System is a visitor and vendor tracking software program that allows for quick identification of visitors. You can give access to specific areas and track which doors a visitor has entered or which floors they’ve accessed. It’s easy to set custom alerts to inform staff when a visitor tries to access an area where they should not be. This information is easily stored in the cloud or on the hospital’s own server.

Patient Registration & Bedside Solutions

In addition to ID badges and visitor tracking solutions, Higgins offers medical and hospital wristbands, labels, bracelets, and other bedside solutions.

Hospital registration areas need to quickly produce patient wristbands and labels. Hospital wristbands for patients must be durable, comfortable, legible, scannable, and affordable. They also need to have the necessary information and barcodes required, and these change in the healthcare industry from time to time as new systems are implemented. Bedside solutions allow for scanning a patient’s wristband, the employee ID card, and any specimens collected to ensure 100% accuracy. Labels include all necessary information for lab technicians to get all the information they need so they can easily process specimens and get information back to the nurses and doctors as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Hospital Security Allows Everyone to Focus on What’s Most Important

Hospital security is understandably a very high concern for everyone in today’s world. When you can provide a safe, secure environment in which both patients and those who care for them feel comfortable, it can ease everyone’s mind allowing them to focus on what’s most important – getting the patient well.

To find the right tools for hospital security, we invite you to contact one of the professionals at Higgins. Since 1960, we have been helping our customers provide safe, cost-effective answers to their security problems.