Barbarians at the gates? Combating some new threats to hospital security professionals.
As more and more hospitals seek to change their services and operations to conform to the requirements of managed care, pressures to cut costs in all departments including security are increasing in many areas. Cost-cutting on a large scale is nothing new in health care; witness the DRG "revolution" of the 1980s. And hospitals calling in security consultants for advice or entertaining proposals from contract security firms has always been part of the way things are done. But the current situation has spawned some new players in the game. These include facilities planning and space programming consultants with "simplistic" square-footage formulas that have already cost some security directors their jobs, according to IAHSS. Also reportedly getting into the security act are hospital housekeeping contractors whose absence of security know-how or experience has not deterred some administrators from taking their "low ball" bids seriously. In this report, we'll alert you to the nature of the new threats to your hospital's and your own security. We'll spell out how security directors and experts are answering simplistic security formulas with meaningful measurements. And we'll present some ideas and approaches for cost-cutting from past special reports that will help enable you, if called on, to cut costs in a way that will continue to give your facility or organization the most security per dollar spent.
D003253:Consultants; D003363:Cost Control / Q000379:methods; D017721:Hospital Costs; D006754:Hospital Restructuring / Q000191:economics; D018803:Models, Economic; D010561:Personnel Staffing and Scheduling / Q000191:economics*; D010934:Planning Techniques; D012637:Security Measures / Q000191:economics*; D014481:United States; D000078329:Workforce