As we approach another new year, healthcare leaders are outlining their plans and initiatives to make the biggest impact on their organization in 2025. There’s no shortage of opportunities: leaders seek to tackle issues ranging from workforce stabilization to improving patient care and value.
One area where leaders can make a major impact with far-reaching benefits is workplace safety. In a recent survey from McKinsey, nurses who were in the early and middle stages of their careers said that safety was the most influential factor for staying in a role. When nurses are professionally dissatisfied, they look for outside opportunities, causing shortages that impact care. Backfilling these roles can increase staffing costs drastically. And a deficiency in proficient nurses, who have spent time honing their knowledge and skills, can hinder the quality of care.
Leaders can elevate hospital safety in several different ways. By prioritizing a culture of support and well-being with the right safety solutions, organizations can strengthen engagement, retention, and patient care. Investing in safety ensures your staff knows they can always get help when needed. These solutions foster feelings of support and enhance collaboration between staff, EMS personnel, and law enforcement. They also enable situational awareness for responders and security personnel and increase visitor visibility.
Here are five ways healthcare leaders can begin to strengthen safety for their organizations in 2025.
Prioritize a Culture of Support and Well-Being
A survey of nurses indicates employer support for workplace violence prevention strategies contributes to job satisfaction and retention. Workplace violence in healthcare has surged in recent years, with the majority of nurses experiencing at least one type of workplace violence in the previous year. As a result, many nurses and other staff in healthcare facilities don’t feel safe on the job. Nearly 20% of nurses surveyed changed or left their jobs due to workplace violence, with 4% leaving the profession entirely.
The number of nurses leaving their jobs and the profession has contributed to a national nursing shortage that negatively affects patient care. How can healthcare facilities make sure their employees feel safe? Essential steps include:
- Conducting regular safety assessments.
- Implementing a zero-tolerance policy for verbal or physical violence against caregivers.
- Ensuring a clear line of sight or means of immediate communication with other employees.
- Providing clear and easy access to alarms and exit routes.
- Removing or fastening furnishings to prevent their use as weapons.
- Preventing weapons from entering the facility.
- Maintaining an effective alarm system.
- Investing in technology such as duress buttons, metal detectors, ballistic glass, etc.
One of the most critical keys to successfully building a culture of safety is a solid top-down communication plan. Leaders must make the time to listen to frontline staff members’ concerns and act on them. Surveys can be used to gather anonymous feedback in a non-threatening environment. Leaders can use this feedback to develop and implement prevention strategies and multi-layered safety plans that can in return, help stabilize their workforce.
The CENTEGIX Safety Platform enables every employee can get help in an emergency, boosting their sense of safety. The Safety Platform addresses some of the biggest threats to hospital safety, such as means of immediate communication, accelerated response, and maintaining an effective violence prevention plan.
CENTEGIX developed the Safety Platform based on feedback from direct caregivers who interact with patients and families daily. It’s designed to address their concerns based on their real-world experiences.
Creating a culture of safety enhances healthcare providers’ relationships with executive leadership. They feel as though they can trust their leaders to keep them safe from workplace violence. Given that one million nurses are set to retire between 2020 and 2030, retaining existing nurses and supporting those entering the profession is crucial. Turnover among nursing staff costs the average hospital anywhere from over $3 million to over $6 million per year, so investing in their safety can offer a return immediately and in the long run.
Ensure Your People Get Help When They Need It
Hospitals and healthcare facilities open their doors to the community each day. They help hundreds, if not thousands of people. With that open-door policy comes challenges, such as threats against staff. For caregivers to feel safe and do their jobs effectively, they must know help will be accessible when they need it.
Healthcare leaders can improve hospital safety by making sure that staff always get help when they need it most. Rapid response to workplace violence is critical, and quick intervention can improve the chances of successful de-escalation. Knowing that help is always nearby when a caregiver needs it provides a powerful sense of reassurance to your staff.
CENTEGIX solutions enhance these measures to accelerate emergency response. The CENTEGIX CrisisAlert™ duress button is a wearable, discreet badge for all staff. It works with CENTEGIX Safety Blueprint™ to offer precise locating capabilities. It’s not dependent on cell service or Wi-Fi to send an alert. If you already have a safety response plan in place, CrisisAlert can help improve response times and efficiency.
Enable Situational Awareness for Responders and Security Personnel
Helping your responders achieve better situational awareness, and understanding when there is a threat to safety or security, will improve overall outcomes. High levels of situational awareness enable response teams to act quickly and more effectively during an emergency.
Healthcare facility and security teams are a critical component in hospital safety–they’re often the first called upon to de-escalate or mitigate aggressive situations. Greater insight into an unfolding emergency improves situational awareness for your responders. CENTEGIX Safety Blueprint enables responders to identify the video cameras closest to an alert and provides responders with the ability to:
- Assess the level of response needed. Having the perspective of video allows responders to prioritize their actions and scale resources to meet those needs.
- Improve coordination. Real-time video helps teams coordinate and synchronize their responses.
Increase Reporting and Accessibility
There may be several threats a day to your staff, but you won’t know if your incident reporting system doesn’t capture near misses. By implementing an accessible and thorough reporting system, you can gain a better understanding of the most common threats your staff face, how often they face them, and what steps you can take to reduce response times and maximize resolutions.
When teams use the CrisisAlert wearable mobile panic button, the device collects data on every alert sent. These alerts give you insights to best support your staff and ensure effective planning and decision-making.
Make Visitors More Visible
Healthcare facilities are always full of people. Visitors come and go throughout the day and night. A variety of people who haven’t been vetted are on your campus at any given time, and they could pose a threat to hospital safety.
CENTEGIX Enhanced Visitor Management assists facilities with authorizing visitors, to provide better visibility and awareness to who’s on campus and when. You can easily check in, authenticate, and locate visitors in real time, so you have peace of mind about who’s on site.
- Live maps locate visitors on campus so you know where they are at any given time
- Administrators gain campus-wide visibility
- Record and access historical visitor location details
Put Staff Well-Being First with a Robust Safety Solution
Your staff members want to know that when they walk through the doors of your facility, they’ll be safe and protected. They want to know you’re taking steps to protect them while they do their jobs. Putting a robust safety solution in place that ensures staff can get help when they need it, reporting is accessible and analyzed for trends, and leadership values the well-being of their people, contributes to an impactful sense of safety.
Learn more about how CENTEGIX can help you improve hospital safety.
