The Safety and Security of Your Center Are Under Assault. Is Your Team Prepared?

Trinity Health St. Mary’s Hospital in Grand Rapids, MI had to shut its emergency room down due to a bomb threat one evening last week. It was just the latest in a series of threatened or actual violence at healthcare facilities in the United States. Last June, a former surgical patient went on a shooting spree at Saint Francis Hospital in Tulsa, OK, killing four people and injuring several others before committing suicide. Then in October, two people were shot to death at Methodist Dallas (TX) Medical Center. While such events are newsworthy because they happen so infrequently, other catastrophes take place all the time—fires, earthquakes, blizzards, flooding due to natural disaster or failed plumbing…. If your team isn’t well-schooled on procedures they need to follow in a crisis everyone on site could be in danger, your doors could be closed longer than you can afford, and you could lose patients who are forced to find other healthcare providers. Read Developing an Emergency Preparedness Plan for Urgent Care in the JUCM archive to get a better sense of how prepared you are—and what you need to do to become even better prepared.