While violent crime rates at the nation’s hospitals have climbed steadily over the last few years, the 2016 Healthcare Crime Survey conducted by the International Association for Healthcare Security and Safety (IAHSS) Foundation revealed that violent crime actually decreased substantially last year. In fact, the study, which analyzed the responses of security professionals at 263 U.S. hospitals, found that violent crime, which includes murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault, declined by more than 67 percent between 2014 and 2015.
To provide greater context to security professionals in the healthcare environment, the survey takes the total number of crimes reported and incorporates the bed count for all of the hospitals included in the study to calculate crime rates on a per-bed basis. The U.S. hospitals examined had slightly less than 91,000 beds, which translates to a violent crime rate of less than one incident for every 100 beds. That stands in stark contrast to last year’s study, which reported a rate of 2.8 violent crime incidents for every 100 beds.
According to Karim Vellani, CPP, CSC, the study’s lead author and president of Threat Analysis Group, LLC, there are three possible explanations for this year’s recorded drop in violent crime. One could be that the hospitals examined in this year’s survey are not reflective of the same group of hospitals that were included in last year’s results. Alternatively, Vellani says these results could be due to “dumb luck” or it could mean that the efforts hospitals have put into reducing workplace violence and other types of violent crime in their facilities may finally be paying dividends.
“Hospitals, in general, for the past five years at least, have spent an extraordinary amount of time, energy and resources on working towards reducing workplace violence,” explains Vellani. “Those efforts could very well being paying off at least as far as we’re seeing on the aggravated assault side.”
Vellani says it is important to keep in mind that the vast majority of violent crimes reported in hospitals are aggravated assaults —the majority of which are classified by the FBI as “Workplace Violence Type 2” assaults, which are acts of violence committed against hospital staff by patients and visitors. In addition to Type 2 assaults, the FBI places incidents of workplace violence incidents into three other categories including:
- Type 1 – Violent acts committed by criminals who have no connection to the workplace.
- Type 3 – Violence committed against coworkers, supervisors or managers by current or former employees
- Type 4 – Violence committed in the workplace by someone who doesn’t work there but has a connection with someone who does, such as an abusive spouse or domestic partner.
According to the study, 83 percent of aggravated assaults reported in U.S. hospitals as incidents of workplace violence from 2012-2015 were classified as Type 2 assaults. Vellani cautions, however, that it will be impossible to point to a singular cause for this year’s violent crime drop with any real degree of confidence until there is at least a two-year cycle of survey findings.
More Trends Heading in the Right Direction
It is not just violent crime that seems to be taking a downward turn. Although incidents of simple assault and disorderly conduct ticked up slightly in 2015, both have dropped significantly over the past two years compared to what was recorded in 2012 and 2013. Incidents of burglary, theft and vandalism also saw declines in 2015. The only crime at hospitals that has increased slightly over the past two years, according to the survey, is motor vehicle theft.
The slight increase in simple assaults in 2015 could a sign that hospitals and their security staffs are becoming better at stopping incidents before they spiral out of control, according to Vellani.
“The increase in assaults [in 2015] could be reflective of faster intervention. Think about the difference in an assault and an aggravated assault. The assaults went up, the aggravated assaults went down; does that mean that our intervention into combative patients is having more effect and therefore stopping the crime before it escalates into an aggravated assault?” asks Vellani.
“While we’re not preventing all violent crimes or Type 2 workplace violence, it is possible that security’s faster response, staff’s faster calls to security for assistance or staff de-escalation training is reducing the crime from aggravated assault but they remain an assault. In essence, we’re reducing the levels of violence,” Vellani adds.
Although this year’s survey shows that things are trending in the right direction at hospitals with respect to crime and violent crime, Vellani says healthcare security professionals should be digging deeper and evaluating how they can continue to mitigate the risks posed by workplace violence at their facilities and Type 2 incidents specifically.
“I’m concerned about types 1, 3 and 4, don’t get me wrong, but they occur with such low frequency at hospitals that I’m not overly concerned about it,” says Vellani. “Some hospital security departments spend an extraordinary amount of time patrolling parking garages, common areas and the exterior areas of the hospital. While that’s good and will stop some of those Type 2 acts of workplace violence or crimes against patients or visitors in the parking lot, it is not really the key focus area. If you look at the data, it says the primary crimes that are occurring are the Type 2 workplace violence which means our resources, our money needs to be spent on reducing Type 2 incidents and the vast majority of those occur inside the hospital, not in the common areas, grounds or parking lots.”
For more information about the study or to download a free copy, visit http://www.iahss.org/.
