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We at SMSI are expanding the Education Center on our website (www.smsiinc.com). We have found that over the years managers are often interested in how other hospitals are meeting their security needs. There is also a tendency to think that the only ideas for improving security and loss prevention must come from within the health care industry. This predisposition will surely guarantee that you will stay within the proverbial "box." Hospital security may be unique, but it is not so unique that one cannot learn from other industries. Whether appropriate or not, there are also regional differences in approaches to security. For example, anecdotally, it seems the events of 9/11 become less profound as one moves from east to west.
For all of these reasons and more we are hoping to elicit informational papers, across a wide range of disciplines. It is hoped these papers will provide some practical points of view that may benefit the reader. For example, we would hope to see some discussion of contract vs. proprietary security officers. Other questions we would hope to raise are, when is appropriate, and under what circumstances, should we consider CCTV? Does our security program pay its own way? Can you quantify the impact of your security program? Do you know how to quantify the benefits of the security and, hopefully , the loss prevention program? What is a sufficient number of security FTEs? Can we predicate the number of security FTEs on the basis of an officer to square foot ratio, or an officer to bed ratio? How do we compensate for the anticipated reduction in police services if we suffer a bio-terrorism event? How do we determine likely terrorist targets within a 20 mile radius? What are the pitfalls to be avoided when dealing with a security vendor? Will the crime environment increase or decrease over the next five years? Are future construction projects utilizing CPTED (Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design) principals in the design process, and if not, why? Many smaller hospitals have no security department per se, and must find creative remedies.
Our hope is to limit out collecting of articles solely from security professionals. We would hope to hear from law enforcement professionals, lawyers, and architects, to name just a few. Our goal is to engender a repository of ideas.
We would encourage any interested party to submit papers to us via email. Send articles to bill@smsiinc.com. We will gladly accept articles from vendors also, as long as those article do not proxy for an unpaid-paid advertisement. We fully intend to give the author full credit for the submission, including their affiliation and/or employer. This data will be accessible to newsletter subscribers (that subscription being free).
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