"The Ronan Report" provides insight about the activities at the Western Maryland Health System in Cumberland, Maryland, and about the changes taking place in healthcare today from a CEO's perspective.

Wednesday, March 16, 2016

Situational Awareness of Security Risks Facing WMHS

WMHS has engaged the services of Caroline Ramsey Hamilton of Risk and Security Risk Consulting to advise us on institutional security and the safety of our employees primarily related to an active shooter incident. It is our intention to improve the protection of our patients, staff and visitors against active shooters and overall workplace violence.  
Caroline will be on campus in a week or so to perform an assessment of our organization and conduct onsite interviews of staff. She will work with us to do active shooter / workforce violence training for all staff and to implement a situational awareness program for the organization. Caroline brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the engagement, especially through her past work with health systems. 
WMHS is also working with area law enforcement on an active shooter drill to occur this spring. We will then be performing drills on an ongoing basis after this initial spring drill.  We want to make sure that our staff is fully aware of what to do during an active shooter incident and how to best safeguard our patients and their families as well as each other.  
We have done previous safety assessments but never to this extent. Two years ago, we had a safety and security assessment performed of our campus and a number of changes were made. We added additional cameras, upgraded existing cameras with pan tilt and zoom capabilities, upgraded lighting campus wide, added a security escort program, strengthened our visitor management program after hours, added an incident notification system, placed barrier controls outside of the ED and also increased our police presence within the ED to every day.  

The executive team takes the safety and security of our campus very seriously and wants to ensure that every step is taken to best protect our patients and staff.

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