Enhanced Non-Lethal Security Blog

We are excited to welcome our newest team member, Eric Myers, to Guardian 8’s Scottsdale, Ariz. headquarters. A former law enforcement officer who transitioned into the creative sector, he joins Guardian 8 as the new in-house training expert – or “Training Headmaster.” He came to us from Automatik, where he led a creative cadre that specializes in automotive events and training. 

The impacts of CMS regulations on hospital security are widely misconstrued, and for good reason. The agency’s guidelines on Patient Restraint or Seclusion are more than 40 pages long, and strict interpretation of CMS guidelines can entangle your hospital in OSHA or JTC compliance issues.  

This article was originally published by the Boston Herald on April 5, 2015.

By Jordan Graham

Newton-Wellesley Hospital will be rolling out new, non-lethal devices for its security staff in the coming weeks, as hospitals across the country have seen an increase in violent attacks by patients.

Does your hospital security program deliver the patient, staff, and officer security your hospital requires? If you’re like one-third of U.S. hospitals, the answer could be no. When you combine patients’ agitated emotional state with behavioral health issues, drug and alcohol abuse and a poor prognosis, it should come as no surprise that 32 percent of U.S. hospitals reported a rise in attacks in 2014, according to an exclusive Guardian 8 survey of 380 hospital administrators, Chief Security Officers and staff.  

Hospital security staff have long been in the difficult position of trying to keep an emergency department approachable as a valued service to the community, and yet protect staff and patients from those who are capable of extreme violence. This conundrum was at the core of a recent blog post appearing on the Joint Commission Leadership blog, titled Hospital Security – Different Approaches to Mitigating Violence, by Mark Crafton. The piece centered on discussion of the pros and cons of arming hospital security guards with deadly force weapons.

The commonly held belief that officers are safer when carrying fewer tools is a fallacy.

According to the National Institute of Justice’s study, Less Lethal Weapon Effectiveness, Use of Force, and Suspect & Officer Injuries, confrontations in which officers used less force than the suspects they were apprehending tended to last longer and lead to more injuries than confrontations that were subdued in the first iteration, or use of force. Hospitals that presume that tools add risk are actually pushing themselves into a higher risk category. Continue...