Healthcare Security Officer Training
Helping hospitals to create safe and secure services since 2006, through conflict and interventions training.
- Create a safe and secure place for your staff, visitors and patients
- Establish and Protect your Security Team’s Social Contract
- Head off emerging conflict situations before they have escalated
- De-Escalate conflict and crisis incidents with greater professionalism
- Effectively and Appropriately deal with physical violence
As a security professional at your hospital, you want staff to have confidence that they are doing the right things, which create a space where violence is not compatible with how people are welcomed to the hospital and treated while they are there.
“I’d just like to take this opportunity to thank you for a first class course, both in delivery and content. The level of instruction was easy to follow, constructive and as I mentioned in the feedback, it was backed up by rationale, current best practice and legislation. Thanks also for your patience and your ability to adapt to your audience.”
Accredited Security Management Specialist
Member of National Association of Healthcare Security (NAHS)
By understanding the key conflict flashpoints which hospitals everywhere face, and helping you to discover the flashpoints which may be unique or acute in your service right now, our team of advisors and trainers can offer Healthcare Security Officer Training interventions which effectively professionalise your team. Our aim is that your hospital establishes and protects a social contract – a culture of appropriately dealing with conflict, violence and aggression – which uplifts your staff and allows the values you believe in to shine through in every interaction.
Physical skills development is deployed against a backdrop of in-depth training for HCSOs on the Vistelar training programme for conflict management and crisis intervention. Physical skills are ‘meshed’ with verbal skills in all possible training evolutions, creating a seamless programme of patient and visitor management during an incident of aggression, violence or emotional disturbance.
De-Escalating Conflict
Improving Safety through Verbalisation Skills
Ensure that patients and visitors are treated with Dignity and Shown Respect
Foster an atmosphere of non-escalation by establishing and protecting the social contract
Encourage collaboration through verbal skills of persuasion and influence.
Encourage consistent Initial Contacts, Empathy and Listening in your interactions
Personal Safety & Breakaway
Improving Safety through Personal Approaches to Risk
Situational Awareness and Proxemics
Understanding the principles of Reasonable Force
The Duty of Reasonable Care
Risk Awareness in Violent Confrontations
Reflexive Movement for Breakaway and Disengagement
Physical Interventions
Improving Safety by leveraging Team Approaches
Teamwork and Communication during incidents
Safe Approach and Verbal Persuasion
Control tactics, Restraint and Immobilisation where necessary as a last resort.
Clinical Procedures for Restraint where necessary
Awareness of the Risks of Sudden Death During Restraint and how to reduce and avoid them
“During the violence audits I have conducted in hospitals – usually sitting in the Emergency Department or the main entrance-points – I have seen both the best and the worst of human behaviour on all sides of the encounters I observed. Our goal as your trusted advisors is to give your teams the tools they need to ensure that everyone in your hospital is treated with dignity and is shown respect – regardless of the initial behaviour or presentation. In this way you and your teams can establish the social contract and ethos of care at your hospital”
— Gerard O’Dea, Author, Expert Witness and Hospital Violence advisor.
Benefits of our Healthcare Security Officer Training programme:
- Reduced incidence (and cost) of staff physical or emotional injuries
- Reduction in patient or visitor complaints and dissatisfaction
- Improved staff and patient experience of interaction
- Enhanced safety – even during high-risk incidents.
Feedback on our Healthcare Security Officer Training
Non-Escalation, De-Escalation and Crisis Intervention Skills in Hospital Environments.
Healthcare Security Officers who complete this training will:
UNDERSTAND – Core Ideas and Concepts the HCSO will take back to the workplace after the Physical Interventions Skills training.
- In which scenarios a Healthcare Security Officer may use force
- When Force May Be Used
- How Much Force to Use
- The Role of Perception and Belief
- Omission
- Recklessness
- Duty to Self
- Making decisions in regard to Capacity (MCA) (appropriate to clinical level)
- Dynamic Risk Assessment
- Expectations in regard to serious and imminent danger
- Contributors to restraint-related fatality – officer actions
- Contributors to restraint-related fatality – subject factors
- How to read the warning signs of a vulnerable subject
- What to do if the subject suffers medical collapse
- Recommended Principles for safely approaching a subject
- Recommended Principles for managing space and position and body language
- Recommended Principles for protect oneself from common assaults
- Recommended Principles to assist a colleague who is being assaulted
- Recommended Principles for Prompting, Guiding and Escorting a hesitant subject
- Recommended Principles for controlling a resistant subject (lower risk context)
- Recommended Principles for controlling a resistant subject (higher risk context)
- Recommended Principles for holding a resistant subject (lower risk context)
- Recommended Principles for holding a resistant subject (higher risk context)
- Recommended Principles for stabilising a resistant subject (high risk context)
- OPTIONAL Recommended Principles for using restraint devices with a subject to reduce risk.**
DO – Skills and Behaviours which the HCSO will be able to deploy after the Physical Interventions Skills training
- Be able to engage in an interaction with appropriate verbalisation skills which reduce the risk of escalation*
- Be able to choose and deploy positioning, distance and body language which enhance officer presence and safety in a situation
- Be able to Prompt, Guide and Escort a hesitant subject from location to location with maximum personal safety
- Be able to respond to a sudden, unexpected assault at close proximity using the 3 ‘survive’ attitudes.
- Be able to respond to the sudden assault of a colleague through effective physical intervention
- Be able to gain a level of control when engaged with an assaultive subject alone
- Be able to access communications to call for assistance at the appropriate time (3 timings)
- Be able to engage in effective teamwork throughout an interaction with an unpredictable subject.
- Be able to engage with a subject as a team in order to control a physically more-vulnerable person to the appropriate level.
- Be able to use appropriate methods of control to stabilise a situation of high risk with a more-capable subject
- Be able to take appropriate action when a physical intervention results in the stabilisation of the individual on the floor.
Please refer to the Vistelar Conflict Management training package for specific elements of the verbalisation skills elements of the training for Healthcare Security Officers.
Vistelar training is a system of conflict management which aims to ‘Treat People with Dignity and Show Respect’ in every encounter, regardless of the outcomes in the interaction. It is a system of non-escalation and de-escalation of conflict through an interaction’s normal Context, Contact and Closure phases which takes into account the possibility of Conflict, Crisis and occasionally Combat during the timeline.
For information about the Vistelar Conflict Management programme, pleaser visit: www.dynamis.training/vistelar
