The outpouring of fan grief and media interest following Michael Jackson's death June 25 reverberated in the Los Angeles hospital where Jackson's body arrived, all of which provides interesting lessons for CEOs.
Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center went into lockdown after hundreds of people began gathering outside the building awaiting further word about Jackson's passing, says Vernon Goodwin, director of security for UCLA Health System.
As part of the lockdown's immediate steps, UCLA "manned all entrances with security personnel and administrative staff, and screened everyone who requested access," Goodwin says.
Such efforts can be monumental in a large hospital, says Steven MacArthur, a safety consultant with The Greeley Company, a division of HCPro, Inc., in Marblehead, MA.
"In a place like UCLA Medical Center, how many doors do they have?" MacArthur says.
The point is that during a lockdown, organizations likely won't have enough security officers to cover all entrances, which leads to what UCLA undertook: Using nonsecurity employees to assist.
Doing so will help a hospital avoid draining its security resources for the fairly routine task of monitoring doors, MacArthur says.
Even smaller hospitals that only have 15 entrances will still be taxed by trying to staff those doors during a lockdown, so regardless of your facility's size, verify that your security policies or incident command system account for alternate staff to bolster security efforts, he says.
From a financial perspective, hospitals also need to ensure that lockdowns don't curb medical services and admissions.
At UCLA, the "biggest challenge was in terms of effectively locking down the facility in a timely manner without disrupting normal operations," Goodwin says.
Lockdown policies should take into account the following considerations:
- Conduct a hazard vulnerability analysis, which is a process by which a facility identifies risks and then weighs those threats against the likelihood of them occurring. Such assessments are required by The Joint Commission for emergency operations plans, but they are also useful for other safety and security efforts. UCLA likely has a greater chance of high-profile celebrities coming to the hospital than many medical centers, but other sites should consider the ramifications of treating people like local sports stars or even the president if he makes a stop in the area, MacArthur says.
- Reach out to community resources, such as police departments and the National Guard, that could help you with manpower during a lockdown. The chances of securing outside forces will be better if a lockdown isn't the result of a regional emergency.
- Establish a series of perimeters to control with a lockdown. The property line is the big perimeter, but the healthcare building itself can be a secondary boundary, and there may be the need for another border within the building. For example, in Jackson's death, it may have been necessary to secure the area where his body lie. Doing so would thwart attempts by hospital employees tempted to shoot a photograph of the corpse, MacArthur says. As evidenced by healthcare workers at UCLA sifting through Britney Spears medical records in March 2008, the lure of celebrities can be strong.
- Practice lockdown plans with drills because it is the only way to determine whether staff members understand how to react. MacArthur espouses the idea of having a normal-looking drill volunteer attempt to enter a locked down facility to see where any potential gaps in monitoring exist.