Healthcare Veteran Wastes No Time Making Her Presence Felt
CS Hospital Director of the Year Lisa Terry was able to hit the ground running when she took over the helm at UNC Health Care by leveraging her years of experience in security and law enforcement.
ODS Security Solutions' Lisa Terry is also a former chief of campus police at WakeMed Health and Hospitals and a former president of the IAHSS Guidelines Council.
Non-Security Staff Training Pays Off
Other training involved active shooter response for non-security staff, which was put to good use in 2015 when a gunman opened fire at one of UNC’s wellness centers (fortunately, no one was injured during the attack).
After the incident, the manager of the center was recognized by the city for his exemplary actions during the attack. Terry and her team were also recognized for the active shooter training her department had provided to that facility’s employees.
The attack also prompted other UNC facilities to request onsite active shooter response and prevention training. This, in turn, prompted Terry to direct her department to develop specific training, which was provided to more than 50 offsite UNC locations in the following six months.
The 2015 active shooter incident also drove home the need for UNC to make all of its facilities harder targets.
Data Justifies Security Department Improvements
Terry is a big believer in using data and analysis to determine what solutions are needed and most effective.
She began to track her department’s activities and shared these findings with UNC Health’s environment of care committee and other hospital departments to provide an overall summary of security management’s activities and recommendations. Graphs and statistics were presented to the disruptive patient committee and to the vice president to justify her department’s need for training and equipment.
For example, from 2012-2014, there was more than a 34 percent reduction in the number of weapons brought into the emergency department. The reduction was due in part to the use of metal detection at the emergency department’s main ambulatory entrance. This data justified the need for metal detectors and an officer to be present in all of the UNC Hospitals emergency departments at all times.
Another example involves patient restraints.
“Monthly, I compare our department’s overall calls for service versus the number of physical patient interventions,” Terry says. “I display this information in a run chart so that our executives can see that although the clinical patient restraints are very nominal and flat, the physical patient interventions make up at least 50 percent of all of our calls for service.”
Terry Uses A Collaborative Approach
Although data is extremely helpful in justifying security upgrades, it may be necessary to combine it with an empathetic approach when dealing with problems that are chronic and difficult to solve. At UNC, one of those challenges was infant abduction system false alarms.
Terry compared the number of false alarms with the number of births and pediatric discharges. She discovered that more errors occurred when there were more births and discharges. She then brought this data to the attention of the nursing staff.
“We were able to sit down and brainstorm how we could make it a safer patient environment,” she says. “We made it more about patient safety than about us having to respond to false alarms too often.”
This approach changed the dynamic between security and the nursing staff from blame and anger – where security was frustrated with the nursing staff and the nurses were defensive – to one of cooperation. Terry asked them, “What can we do to make sure that when you are busy, we can keep these infants safe?”
It turned out that during those busy times, the maternity and
pediatric areas didn’t have enough staff. Terry’s false alarm data was able to provide nursing with a way to justify to hospital top executives the need to hire more employees.
This revised approach showed nursing that the security department was an ally, not an adversary.
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About the Author
Robin Hattersley, Editor-in-Chief
Robin has been covering the security and campus law enforcement industries since 1998 and is a specialist in school, university and hospital security, public safety and emergency management, as well as emerging technologies and systems integration. She joined CS in 2005 and has authored award-winning editorial on campus law enforcement and security funding, officer recruitment and retention, access control, IP video, network integration, event management, crime trends, the Clery Act, Title IX compliance, sexual assault, dating abuse, emergency communications, incident management software and more. Robin has been featured on national and local media outlets and was formerly associate editor for the trade publication Security Sales & Integration. She obtained her undergraduate degree in history from California State University, Long Beach.
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