In today’s Modern Healthcare, SSM Health Chief Operating Officer Steve Smoot offers the healthcare industry a look at the measures that our organization is taking to make our teammates, patients and visitors safer.
While nothing can prevent all violence, no other industry deals with the frequent physical and verbal assaults that affect healthcare workers, according to data compiled by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“People who choose to work in healthcare often do so out of empathy and compassion for others,” Smoot writes. “It’s a challenging irony that these caregivers, who are only trying to ease people’s pain and cure their ailments, are five times more likely to experience violence in the workplace than any other profession.”
While other public spaces – like schools, places of worship and theaters – have also had to adjust to this reality, Smoot shares tangible measures that SSM Health is implementing to make its spaces safer, encouraging other health systems and providers to follow our example.
These include:
- Training in trauma-informed care and de-escalation
- Security academies
- Public education
- Diligence and redesign
The early results are encouraging, Smoot says.
“From 2021 to 2023,” he writes, “we achieved decreases of more than 20% in both annual ‘struck by patient’ incidents and employee days away from their jobs due to workplace violence. During that same period, worker compensation cases involving violence also dropped, from 105 to 64.”
Smoot urges health systems to join together to keep our facilities as safe as possible.
“As an industry, it’s our responsibility to provide security for our caregivers so they, in turn, are able to care for others,” he writes. “When we collaborate and freely share best practices, we will meet the challenge.”
