NFPA 99 Chapter 13 and healthcare security management.

The new NFPA 99 Security Management Standard for healthcare facilities requires a Security Vulnerability Analysis be conducted annually, the author reports. This will usually uncover little change from year to year, he says, but by using the right model the analysis can be used to win back security additions that had previously been rejected by the C-Suite.

Infectious disease protection for healthcare security officers.

Healthcare Security should be considered an active component in an infectious disease event, the authors maintain, and security officers must be included in an Employee Health screening and N95 fit testing initiative to safely welcome the incoming infected patients. In this article, they spell out the different levels of precautions officers should become familiar with in order to protect themselves.

Where there is smoke, there is fire...of a different kind.

Tackling the difficult issue of enforcing your hospital's smoke free policy, the author discusses the problems raised by smokers who just won't or can't comply. Strict enforcement, he says, is not always the best policy. The more a whole-hospital community approach is taken to truly create a "smoke free" environment, the more likely it will become uncomfortable for smokers to violate the facility's policy.