Healthcare and security

Integrated security solutions for healthcare providers must adhere to the very highest standards, and keeping all staff, property, patients, and visitors safe requires consultants to think very carefully about all aspects of the project. In fact, insuring that a hospital or large health clinic is kept 100% secure is one of the most demanding of all security tasks.

Barriers need to be maintained between public access areas and staff-only areas but staff also need to move through their workplace quickly and efficiently. The doctors and nurses at a busy hospital can’t allow security concerns to eat up precious time, particularly in an emergency situation. When something goes badly wrong for a patient or a large number of serious cases arrive at once, security concerns cannot impede or slow down work.

However, it must also be recalled that hospitals and clients also house a wide variety of extremely expensive items with very high resale value. Wherever drugs are stored, there is a threat of theft or misuse. Security and CCTV systems should be arranged to ensure maximum scrutiny of and control over access points to drug storage areas, which may also have to be climate controlled. Different members of staff will have different levels of access and should only be allowed in the areas they have legitimate reason to visit. Even then, each visit to a sensitive storage area should be monitored or at least recorded.

There may also be cause to monitor patients via CCTV systems, particularly those with certain mental health conditions. The safety of staff, visitors, and the patients themselves may be at issue.

There is also another reason to control access in healthcare facilities carefully- infection control. Members of the public who wander away from the designated areas (whether deliberately or not) can pose serious health risks. It’s essential that boundaries be clearly defined and enforced, from both a health perspective and that of integrated security solutions.

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