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Barbarians at the gates? Combating some new threats to hospital security professionals
Insights
Hospitals face increasing security cost-cutting pressures from managed care. This report addresses new threats and offers strategies for effective security spending, ensuring maximum value and protection.
Area of Science:
- Healthcare Administration
- Security Management
- Risk Assessment
Background:
- Hospitals are increasingly pressured to reduce operational costs due to managed care requirements.
- Cost-cutting measures in healthcare are not new, with historical precedents like the DRG revolution.
- Traditional security consulting and contract firms are now facing competition from new, unqualified entities.
Purpose of the Study:
- To alert hospital security professionals to emerging threats in security management.
- To provide methods for security directors to counter simplistic cost-cutting formulas with meaningful metrics.
- To offer strategies for cost-effective security solutions that maximize protection per dollar spent.
Main Methods:
- Analysis of current trends in hospital security cost-cutting.
- Identification of new market entrants and their methodologies (e.g., facilities consultants, housekeeping contractors).
- Review of established security expertise and measurement techniques.
- Compilation of cost-saving strategies from previous reports.
Main Results:
- New consultants may use simplistic formulas, posing risks to security director positions.
- Housekeeping contractors lacking security expertise are offering bids, potentially compromising safety.
- Effective security requires meaningful measurement and expert-driven strategies, not just low bids.
Conclusions:
- Hospital security must adapt to evolving cost pressures without sacrificing essential protection.
- Security directors need robust data and expert knowledge to justify security investments.
- Strategic cost-cutting in security requires a focus on value and effectiveness, not just price.
Abstract:
As more and more hospitals seek to change their services and operations to conform to the requirements of managed care, pressures to cut costs in all departments including security are increasing in many areas. Cost-cutting on a large scale is nothing new in health care; witness the DRG "revolution" of the 1980s. And hospitals calling in security consultants for advice or entertaining proposals from contract security firms has always been part of the way things are done. But the current situation has spawned some new players in the game. These include facilities planning and space programming consultants with "simplistic" square-footage formulas that have already cost some security directors their jobs, according to IAHSS. Also reportedly getting into the security act are hospital housekeeping contractors whose absence of security know-how or experience has not deterred some administrators from taking their "low ball" bids seriously. In this report, we'll alert you to the nature of the new threats to your hospital's and your own security. We'll spell out how security directors and experts are answering simplistic security formulas with meaningful measurements. And we'll present some ideas and approaches for cost-cutting from past special reports that will help enable you, if called on, to cut costs in a way that will continue to give your facility or organization the most security per dollar spent.