ANN ARBOR, Mich.--When the hidden camera aimed at the hospital bed showed the boy's mother smothering him with a pillow, security alerted the nearest nurses' station and stormed the room to restrain her.
It happened just over a month ago -- the boy was saved, the mother arrested and the doctor's suspicions of child abuse were confirmed -- but hospital security director Marilyn Hollier says things like this happen all the time.
STORY CONTINUES BELOW
Advertisement
"We knew the only way to catch her was to put a covert camera in the room," said Hollier, who heads security at the University of Michigan Health System, a six million-square-foot campus with three hospitals, 30 health centers and 120 outpatient clinics. "It was just a matter of teamwork between us and the nurses."
Hollier and her security team's close collaboration with hospital personnel is one of the reasons they received this year's Lindberg Award for most outstanding healthcare security program from the International Association for Healthcare Security & Safety.
The award will be presented this week at the association's annual conference in Vancouver.
"We've applied for (the Lindberg Award) in past years and never got it," Hollier said. "But we've done a lot of things recently that have helped set us apart,"
Over the past year, Hollier's department has nearly doubled in size to 132 staff members, added a division of screeners to oversee a new program that requires visitors to wear badges, introduced a new infant monitoring system that's helped curbed false alarms and increased its training budget by 10 percent.
"We've started utilizing our officers to train hospital employees in nonviolent crisis intervention so that they know how to recognize escalating behaviors before they get out of hand," Hollier said. "We preach a lot about early intervention."
She attributes the 4.7-percent drop in the number of incidents requiring patient restraints this year to the added emphasis on training.
Another measure that's improved patient relations is security services' patient property team, which tracks down items lost by patients moving from one room to another. Last year, the team recovered more than $66,000 worth of lost property -- more than half of what went missing.
"We try to get our officers to do more than just their jobs," Hollier said.
That's not to say that keeping the peace is easy.
The department is responsible for 913 beds in a hospital network that sees more than two million visitors per year, which translates to almost a dozen calls for security each day.
"The biggest piece of what we do is the physical management of patients and family members," Hollier said. "We have a lot of psychiatric patients and family members who are under a ton of stress, so you wind up with a lot of tension in a confined space."
Her secret?
"Hiring the right people," she said. "We spend six weeks putting people through all kinds of hoops, including psychiatric evaluations, before we hire them. And then we have an extensive 14-week training program they must complete before we even let them work. But that all ends up leading to a very high retention rate and low turnover, and that's why we've become an irreplaceable presence in the healthcare setting."
