American Association of Workplace Violence Prevention

Healthcare’s failure to address link between mental illness and violence putting lives in jeopardy

Posted on July 29, 2014 9:50 am by Caroline Ramsey-Hamilton Comment

DATELINE: JULY 28, 2014

Richard Plotts, the man who allegedly murdered a 53-year old caseworker at a suburban Philadelphia hospital last week by shooting her in the face, was formally charged with murder on Saturday following surgery to remove bullets in his torso.

According to Delaware County District Attorney Jack Whelan, police in Upper Darby, Pa., where Plotts lived, were aware of at least three mental health commitments, including once after he cut his wrists and once when he threatened suicide — but said such stays can last just one to three days. Whelan also noted in his press conference that Plotts had also spent time in a mental health facility.

Every week brings a new story in the media about murder-suicides, patients killing healthcare workers, random shootings and assaults. We can read the new polls like the article on U.S. shootings in healthcare, as well as the recent healthcare crime study by the International Association of Healthcare Security and Safety (IAHSS) that routinely reports that violence in healthcare is soaring.

Not only in healthcare, but throughout the U.S., these random active shooter trends are increasing. To see how much of this violence is related to severe mental health problems, we only have to look as far as these high profile incidents:

June 14, 2012 – Buffalo, N.Y., trauma surgeon shooting
July 20, 2012 – Aurora, Colo., movie theater shooting
Sept. 16, 2013 – Washington Navy Yard shooting
Dec. 17, 2013 – Reno, Nev. urology clinic shooting
Jan. 22, 2014 – LAX active shooter incident
April 2, 2014 – Fort Hood (2nd) active shooter incident

None of these incidents were related to poor performance review, losing a job, and only one of these could be called “domestic violence,” but what they all have in common is that the perpetrators were all severely mentally ill.

Guns scare me. Guns kill people by accident and on purpose. I never let my children play with guns. However, as I analyze the elements of these shootings and dozens more, my bias is changing. I think it’s less about guns and more about mental illness.

Healthcare and hospitals would be the one industry where you would think that people would be concerned about the state of mental health of their patients and staff. Instead, it seems like mental health problems are walled off by society, treated ineffectively, and violent tendencies (which sometimes make their way onto patients’ Facebook pages) are largely ignored and unreported by the clinicians treating them.

So it’s left to the security and law enforcement community to deal with these individuals who are paranoid, depressed, angry, frustrated, disappointed, hurt, confused, and, ultimately, violent.

Now that mental health has been re-classified as another medical problem, the money is flowing to the treatment centers and it’s covered by Medicare. But progress doesn’t seem to be either easy or effective.

Dr. Graham C.L. Davey, Ph.D. writing in Psychology Today in January said: “Many of those health professionals (GPs and family physicians) at the first point of contact with people suffering mental health problems are poorly trained to identify psychological problems in their patients, and have little time available to devote to dealing with these types of problems. This increasingly makes medication prescription an attractive option for doctors whose time-per-patient is limited—an outcome which will have all the potential negative effects of medicalizing the problem into a “disease.”

And that’s exactly what we see, patients who don’t take their meds because of the negative side effects and so they become isolated and increasingly violent. The side effects are clearly pointed out in TV commercials, that you’ve probably watched.

For example, one medicine has side effects that include sexual side effects, convulsions, brain shrinkage, stroke, death, suicide, violent thoughts, psychosis and delusional thinking.

The increase in hospitals adding seclusion rooms, expanding the number of beds for psych patients, and the time spent by both law enforcement and security professionals in dealing with these troubled individuals, may account for one-quarter to one-third of an organization’s security budget.

Many of the security risk assessments we do are focused on handling mobile mental patients, including the baby boomers suffering from Alzheimer’s and dementia.

As violent incidents continue to increases in our society, our workplaces, and in our hospitals, we need to spend more time looking for, and demanding treatments that work and that are sustainable by the patients so they can lead happier lives and we can protect the rest of society, and our healthcare facilities, from their potentially violent behavior.

http://www.securityinfowatch.com/blog/11598089/healthcares-failure-to-address-link-between-mental-illness-and-violence-putting-lives-in-jeopardy

Author: Caroline Ramsey Hamilton

Since 1988, Caroline Ramsey-Hamilton has been a Thought Leader in All Aspects of Active Shooter and Security Risk Assessment in both Public and Private companies and organizations. Specializing in Hospital and Healthcare Security. Hamilton is Certified in Homeland Security (CHS-III), Anti-Terrorism (ATAB) and Security Risk Assessment. As President of Risk & Security (www.riskandsecurityllc.com) she works with many hospital clients, and develops affordable risk-based apps for improving security risk assessments, and publishes the RISKAlert security awareness program. She lives in south Florida with two beagles, a rescued kitty and (on weekends), 4-year old twins.

Reprinted with permission from www.SecurityInfoWatch.com

Why We Need to Switch to a Risk-Based Security Model – School Stabbing at Franklin Regional, Active Shooter Incidents at Fort Hood (twice), LAX, and The Washington Navy Yard.

Posted on April 15, 2014 8:42 pm by Caroline Ramsey-Hamilton Comment

When I turned on the news today, I was in the middle of writing an article on the 2^nd Shooting
at Ft. Hood from last week, and then saw that there had been a violent knife attack at a
Pennsylvania high school, with 20 casualties and at least eight injured critically, the next day,
there was a hate crime shooting at the Jewish community center in Overland Park, Kansas.

Once again, we see violence on a mass scale, the FBI has been brought in, and next will come
information on the victims. With two major events, in two weeks, what can we deduce about the
security in place at both Franklin Regional High School, Pennsylvania, and Fort Hood, Texas.

NEWS FLASH: THE CURRENT SECURITY MODEL IS NOT WORKING!

CURRENT SECURITY MODELS

Disaster preparedness is improving, Emergency Management is working, but security is
still not where it needs to be. It is a systemic problem based on the fact that security around
the U.S. is still locked in a REACTIVE mode, not a PROACTIVE mode.

The main reason for this reactive mode in security organizations, is because most security
officers come from a law enforcement background, with a model which is based on crimes
and arrests, and it is totally REACTIVE. A crime happens and police officers go into action
and arrest the perpetrator(s).

CRIME HAPPENS = PERP IS IDENTIFIED = PERP IS ARRESTED

Unfortunately, this reactive model does not work for preventing security incidents and mass violence
because it is INCIDENT DRIVEN, not Risk-Driven. It focuses on individuals, not on a more holistic,
generalized view of Threats, and it totally leaves Solutions (Controls) out of the equation.

After studying pages of after action reviews, post-incident analyses and media sources, the one
recommendation that makes sense is that organizations need to switch to a RISK-BASED,
PROACTIVE mode for security to work.

This was highlighted in a remark made by a Pentagon official, commenting on the 2^ndFort Hood
Shooting on April 2, and the fact that new DOD recommendations for security, had just been released.

“After the Navy Yard shooting in September 2013, another round of recommendations were made
to improve security at all DOD installations, however, a Pentagon official said that the new
recommendations had not yet been put into effect at Fort Hood. At Fort Hood, very little had
changed from 2009 regarding security procedures for soldiers at the entrance gates.”

The question for the Department of Defense is “how could this happen again at the same military
base? I took extra time to study the 89-page document called An Independent Review “Protecting
the Force”, one of 3 reports created after the initial Fort Hood Shooting, whene 13 were killed, and
43 injured.

If you look at the recommendations, they are very bureaucratic and procedural. They could have
been written by an efficiency expert, not by anyone with a background in security, and covered things
like policy changes, and having screening for clergy and psychologists, and improved mental health
programs. These are all important, but they do not provide a secure environment.

The LAX after action analysis’ Number One recommendation was to change
the security focus to a Risk-Based approach.

RISK-BASED SECURITY

The problem with a reactive approach is that you can’t screen and lock down everyone. At Fort
Hood, for example, there are 80,000 individuals living on the base, and probably hundreds of
visitors who go in and out every day. It’s impossible to assess the mental health, and the
‘intentions’ of all of them.

That’s why a Risk-Based Approach works – because it focuses on the potential threats and then evaluates the existing controls to see whether they offer the required amount of protection based on the likelihood of the threat occurring.

You stop violent events by controlling access and by controlling weapons. No matter how unpopular they are, you use metal detectors at certain points, you use security officers at key entrances, you control entrances and exits.

Once the event starts, you can improve security by having faster notification (panic alarms), ability
to block, or disable weapons and attackers, adequate transport, better emergency response, but to
avoid the violence, you need to have strong access control.

The Risk-Based approach makes use of annual risk assessments that are holistic in nature. They
are not done in stovepipes, they include the entire organizations, they include input from staff
members, visitors, students, vendors, soldiers, patients on how they see security from their point
of view, which is always dramatically different from management or administration.

A risk-based approach requires an organization to:

Define potential security risks.
Develop standardized risk assessment processes, for gathering and
analyzing information, and use of analytical technology
Risk-Based Security focuses on PREVENTION OF NEW INCIDENTS
whether they are active shooter, general violence, etc.
Enhances security’s ability to rapidly respond to changes in the threat environment.

MORE BANG FOR THE BUCK

According the LAX (LAWA) after action report, “Simply adding more security does not
necessarily provide better security. Determining priorities and where to achieve great
value for the dollars invested requires regular, systematic assessment of the likelihood
and consequences (risks) associated with a range of threat scenarios that morph and
change more quickly now than ever before.

Collaborative engagement in a security risk assessment process across the community builds
the buy-in needed to develop and sustain a holistic security program over time. Leaders must
be open to challenging established practices and demonstrate a willingness to change direction”.

Making the switch to a Risk-Based security program is the best recommendation for those who
want to protect their staff, students, patients, vendors, clients, soldiers, and visitors from a mass
casualty event, or for all the organizations who don’t want to have a terrible incident happen in
the first place!

Caroline Ramsey-Hamilton

President, Risk and Security LLC

Caroline@riskandsecurityllc.com

www.securityinfowatch.com/blogs

www.riskandsecurityllc.com

Get Management’s Attention for Security – Shooter Kills the Hospital Administrator

Posted on January 6, 2014 12:14 pm by Caroline Ramsey-Hamilton Comment

Every Security Officer I’ve ever met has mentioned how difficult it can be to get funding for additional security! It is a never-ending mission, to get the budget for a security program that will truly protect an organization.

Hospitals are no exception. They have suffered their own financial problems and because security is not seen as a ‘clinical’ or ‘patient care’ issue, it is easy to take money from security and put it somewhere else.

But there’s one sure way to get management’s attention for Security — having a security incident. And if you don’t have one at your organization, high profile security incidents at other facilities will all grab management’s attention.

In my Risk-Pro Security Incident Report today, a shooter killed four, wounded three, and then killed himself. What was unusual about this incident was that the shooter went to the Hospital Administrator’s house and shot the administrator dead, and then shot his wife who was taken to an area hospital.

Most executives and administrators think about security as sort of an abstract concept, that doesn’t directly affect them. But it might, and by sending your management a copy of our Risk-Pro Incident Report, you’ll get their attention this time!

(Subscribe to the Risk-Pro Incident Report program by sending an email with the word SUBSCRIBE on it to info@riskandsecurityllc.com)

The LAX Shooting and the Active Shooter Threat

Posted on November 3, 2013 9:26 am by Caroline Ramsey-Hamilton Comment

With the 3^rd Active Shooter incident in less than 45 days, you are probably wondering what is happening here? Why are we having so many active shooters?

There are not any easy answers, but one thing is certain, all the shooters in the Navy Yard Shooting, the Sparks Middle School shooting, and the LAX Shooter all suffered from psychological problems.

In the LAX shooting, the shooter ‘s parent had tried to contact the police because of a suicide text they had received, but it was already too late.

Police red tape being what it is – thorough, the urgency was lost and the incident was already in process before anything had been done.

BUT NOTE: The text was a HELP ME. And it was noticed, but not followed up in time.

All these shooters had major mental issues, that people had noticed, and
that people had remarked on, and that people had worried about.

We don’t know where all the guns in the incidents were purchased, or just picked up at home and taken to the scene.

BUT we know that most of the active shooters had mental issues, which means that the screenings must be approved, and more help available for these individuals, before they can kill or hurt others.

Planning an Active Shooter Drill, Why Once is Not Enough

Posted on October 17, 2013 8:25 am by Caroline Ramsey-Hamilton Comment

Almost every day I get a note that a hospital or corporate facility is planning to have an Active Shooter Drill. That is always good news because it is a critical part of preparedness that protects not only against an active shooter incident, but also prepares the staff for other emergencies, but it may not be enough.

I’ve found that to be really effective, drills need to be supplemented with short training sessions, and also awareness programs that teach staff to be on their toes, or “situationally aware”. Security awareness training doesn’t have to be a full time job and it doesn’t have to be expensive.

One of the best ways to create an on-going security awareness program is to make a 12-month calendar, with an activity for each month, or better yet, every two weeks. Here’s a list of activities I use:

1. Start with a one page newsletter. You can have the marketing department help, or use WordPress to design your
own newsletter and email it out to all the staff. Whether your staff is 100 people or 6000 people, it’s a great way to promote the security program.

2. Send out very short emails highlighting news items about security incidents at other companies, especially ones in your industry, for example, hospitals. If there’s a terrible incident at another hospital, cut and paste the story and email it to everyone. In fact, if you’re an IAHSS or ASIS member, their publications have great stories about different security situations.

3. Use seasonal reminders. Now that it’s late October and daylight savings time is almost over, send an email reminding staff how to stay alert when they leave the facility after dark and head for their car. How to use the escort service, if that’s available, or how to use your keys as a weapon in a potential incident.

4. Buy posters to put in the cafeteria, or in the elevators that serve as reminders about the concept of staying alert and aware of your surroundings at all time.

I have interviewed more than 8000 staff members in the last 10 years, and they welcome these reminders and feel more secure just because you are keeping awareness up. Remember, it also reminds everyone that there is a Security Department, and that is working every day to keep them safe.

The Department of Homeland Security also provides free brochures and charts you can print out and give to employees, or you can email them for the staff member to print out and put in their purse. There are wallet sized cards, and lots of other great information you can use in your own active shooter awareness program.

Check out the preliminary OIG Report, which was leaked to Time Magazine on their swampland.com site at

What’s Your Active Shooter Risk? How to Assess the Threat!

Posted on October 15, 2013 4:54 pm by Caroline Ramsey-Hamilton Comment

Just the idea of an Active Shooter in your organization, whether you’re a military base, like Fort Hood, and the Washington Navy Yard, or a school like Sandy Hook, a beauty shop, a cracker factory in Philadelphia, a retail mall, a movie theatre, a grocery store parking lot, or a hundred other places, is a terrifying thought.

I lived about 3 miles from one of the shooting sites, a gas station, used by the Beltway Snipers back in October, 2002. They killed ten people, totally at random, and critically injured three others. Both of the snipers were sentenced, and John Muhammad was killed by lethal injection in 2009.

If you lived in the DC area, do you remember how scary it was just to pump gas into your car, people were huddled against the side of their cars in the gas stations, and hidden by their shopping carts at the local Home Depots.

The fear of the Active Shooter comes from the seeming randomness of the action, which means there’s no way to prevent it, unless you give up, stay home, and hide under the bed all day.

But there are things you can do. Instead of thinking of an Active Shooter incident as a totally unique situation, it’s really a form a Workplace Violence, Gas Station Violence, Parking Lot Violence and other related forms of random violence. In fact, the Department of Homeland Security has identified quite a few steps you can take to keep yourself safer if you are in the vicinity of an active shooter (http://www.dhs.gov/active-shooter-preparedness).

Most of the shooters are mentally ill. Normal individuals do not enjoy planning and killing strangers, and it is usually a last ditch effort, with the suicide of the shooter as the grand finale. Their actions can sometimes be identified early, and the police can be alerted, or the Human Resources group at work, or even the local Sheriff can intervene before it gets to the actual shooting.

Signs that someone is having trouble negotiating their life, especially if that someone is a gun fanatic, with their living room full of AK-47 assault weapons and hollow point bullets, is not hard to spot, because these individuals often leave lots of warning signs, like:

Irrational Posts on Facebook or inappropriate tweets.
Threats made against friends and family.
A dropoff in personal hygiene, as the person gets more obsessed.
Problems negotiating their personal life.
Demonstrating signs of isolation and groundless paranoia

Organizations can protect themselves from an potential active shooter through a combination of specific controls that include elements like access control, continuous monitoring of cameras, employee awareness and training programs, clear cut evaluation routes, regular active shooter drills, and hardening of facilities, to name a few.

One of the best preventive measures is to conduct an Active Shooter Risk Assessment, which is similar to other security analyses, except that it is focused on a particular set of threats related to an Active Shooter Incident. As part of my annual Threat Trend Reports, I’ll be releasing a new set of threat data about the Active Shooter, to help organizations calculate their risk of
having such an incident. For example, did you know that the number of active shooter incidents has jumped from 1 in 2002
to 21 incidents in 2010?

Locations have changed, too, and we found that

About 25% of active shooter incidents occur in schools,
About 25% in retail locations, and
About 37% in workplaces.

In future blogs, we’ll be looking at each element of the active shooter incident, and providing more information to keep
your organization safe.

Has it Been Only Two Weeks since the Navy Yard Shootings?

Posted on October 2, 2013 4:07 pm by Caroline Ramsey-Hamilton Comment

When i wrote my blog about the Shootings at the Washington Navy Yard on September 16th, I got some nasty notes about “Why did you have to write about this so soon after it happened?”

Well – I guess the fact that after about 15 days, no one can even remember the incident (8 people shot to death); the name of the shooter (Aaron Alexis), or much of the details. It seems that people have decided that it was a mentally distributed person, so couldn’t have been prevented. This is completely wrong.

One of the issues that security directors have is how to make their organization aware of the active shooter threat without terrifying them. How do you get a large group of people out of the “It can’t happen here” mindset? One of the main ways to bring an issue back home is by using the incident as a security awareness notice.

Write a “Lessons Learned” email and send it to everyone in the organization. Follow it up with a purse and wallet card with reminders on what to do when faced with an Active Shooter situation.

Keep everyone informed on what happens after the incident – how the injured are doing, and more importantly, what changes the organization has made to ensure that it won’t happen again.

Try doing a simple threat-risk assessment to illustrate to management what the chances of having an active shooter incident actually are, based on the industry, the region, and the number of problems/complaints that employees have expressed in the past.

Don’t let anyone forget that this can happen to any organization, no matter how well funded, or how secure they think they are. Remember, if it could happen in a DOD military facility – it could happen to YOU!

Navy Yard Shooting Highlights Effect of Cuts to Navy Security

Posted on September 24, 2013 12:26 pm by Caroline Ramsey-Hamilton Comment

Security professionals around the entire were shocked and dismayed when they turned on the news and saw the historic Washington Navy Yard locked down, surrounded by emergency vehicles, and looking for an active shooter.

All the shock, the outrage, the Defense Department reaction, the involvement of the overlapping law enforcement jurisdictions, has apparently been already forgotten by the public, moved to the virtual ‘old story’ pile by the latest news of a mall shooting in Kenya, meeting at the UN, and the politics as usual in Washington DC.

If you graph it online, you can see the dramatic spike and then the dramatic drop-off in interest by the general public. This highlights what the security community has to deal with, in the context of a 24 hour news cycle.

My perspective on the event was personal because one of my very best friends was in Building 197 that day, a former navy commander, now a contractor, who went to work at 5 am that morning, and finally returned home at 9 pm that night. Unlike many shootings, the PCs, smartphones were all up and operational during the event, so people were instantly able to communicate with friends and relatives as the event unfolded.

Rumors ran rampant that it was terrorism related, that there were three shooters, then that rumor switched to two shooters and eventually to only one shooter, Alexis Aaron, a mentally disturbed young man who had previous events of gun violence and yet had a top secret security clearance at the time of the shooting.

If we took a poll three weeks ago and asked people which facility would they judge to be the safest, the results
would probably look something like this:

1. Military Base in the U.S.
2. Hospital
3. Regional Mall
4. Police Station

Unfortunately – this is more like a list of the places where a shooting is more likely to take place. As all the work in workplace violence statistics shows, a domestic Military Base has been the site of two mass shootings in only the last 4 years. This includes the twelve killed and eight wounded at the Washington Navy Yard, as well as the thirteen killed and twenty injured at the Fort Hood shooting in late 2009. That’s an average of 6 killed each year, and 8 injured, and doesn’t take into account any random shootings, training-related injuries, only the mass shootings.

Hospitals have increased in violent incidents every year for the last ten years, and we just witnessed a mass shooting at a Kenyan Mall.

However, the hospital and the mall are both completely OPEN, they want people to come in, they don’t control access at all.
This is what is so surprising about the Navy Yard shootings, the lack of security, lack of enough armed guards, lack of current background checks, lack of metal detectors, lack of retina scanners, and every other usual form of security control.

Speculation is that the key controls were missing because of budget cuts, which means that the Navy made the decision to reduce security controls, instead of cutting other, less critical programs. The incident makes a strong case for examining the potential Return on Investment for security controls!

Even if the shooter’s background check was “current”, it certainly had not been updated based on his own recent events, and brushes with the police, and, of course, the anger and mental health problems appears again, and is shrugged off as too tough to manage and track.

However, it is a wake up call for the U.S. Navy, the Department of Defense, the U.S. Capital Police, and a variety of other organizations who “Secure” the Washington DC Capitol zone, and it leads to more questions than answers.

Already, the questions are starting about what controls SHOULD be in place for all military bases, and, naturally, re-examining the background check process and how it could be updated and improved.

Let’s not forget this time.

New App does a Workplace Violence Baseline Assessment

Posted on March 13, 2013 10:21 am by Caroline Ramsey-Hamilton Comment

New Workplace Violence Prevention App helps companies do an OSHA Violence Baseline Assessment

DATELINE: Boca Raton, Florida, March 12, 2013

Workplace Violence in US companies is a problem that is getting worse. Workplace violence is a serious recognized occupational hazard, ranking among the top four causes of death in workplaces during the past 15 years. More than 3,000 people died from workplace homicide between 2006 and 2010, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Additional BLS data indicate that an average of more than 15,000 nonfatal workplace injury cases was reported annually during this time.

The latest figures show that high-risk organizations like hospitals, behavioral health treatment, home health workers and late night retail establishments are at a dramatically increased risk for experiencing a violent incident at work.

OSHA, and over thirty state government regs recommend that companies do an annual Workplace Violence Basement Assessment, but these are time-consuming and difficult to manage.

To solve the problem, Risk & Security LLC has released a new web-based app, Workplace Violence Risk-Pro©, which makes security directors into Risk Professionals!

OSHA standard 3148 (Guidelines for Preventing Workplace Violence for Health Care &

Social Service Workers)and the new OSHA Inspection Directive, Enforcement Procedures for Investigating or Inspecting Incidents of Workplace Violence, from September, 2011, are both included in the new, easy-to-use application.

The program has been tested on some of the largest organizations in the US, and runs on a laptop, PC or tablet, and even on a smartphone!. Workplace Violence Risk-Pro© is built to be affordable and simple to use.

The web 2.0 program, includes newly compiled, updated threat databases, and automated web-surveys based on the exact OSHA Directives.

The new program gives human services and security professionals a quick and easy way to conduct a workplace violence baseline assessment that will pass an audit!

The Risk-Pro© model has been used for easy software applications with the Department of Defense and over hundreds of organizations, hospitals, maritime organizatons, and local, state and federal government agencies.

About Risk & Security LLC

Risk & Security LLC is a security risk assessment and risk analysis company with over 30 years of combined expertise in security risk. It specializes in consulting on risk assessment projects and global application development of risk solutions. Risk & Security partners with security companies around the world to provide state-of-the-art security expertise to analyze risk and recommend cost-effective countermeasures.

The team of risk and security experts is led Caroline Ramsey-Hamilton, who has created more than 40 software programs, and conducted more than 200 specialized security risk assessments in a variety of environments, including companies in the United States and around the world, including in Abu Dhabi, Hong Kong, Japan, South Africa and Qatar.

Why Workplace Violence is Always a Catastrophe

Posted on March 13, 2013 10:12 am by Caroline Ramsey-Hamilton Comment

Workplace violence incidents are one of the most damaging events that can happen to any organization. The good news is that workplace violence is one of the few threats that companies can actually prevent before it happens.

Unlike earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, war, and explosions, workplace violent incidents can be prevented if the organization makes a commitment to educate their employees, and give them the knowledge they need to address a potential problem with a co-worker before it gets to an explosive level, for example, making the active shooter drills part of the security program.

In many ways, workplace violence is worse than other kinds of violent incidents because it always involves a major violation of trust, and it also has a malicious component, where the perpetrator is deliberating focusing on violence against a fellow human that they know personally and may have directly worked with, sometimes for year.

According to OSHA, workplace violence is a serious recognized occupational hazard, ranking among the top four causes of death in workplaces during the past 15 years. More than 3,000 people died from workplace homicide between 2006 and 2010, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Additional BLS data indicate that an average of more than 15,000 nonfatal workplace injury cases are reported every year.

As well as the violation of trust and the violence itself, the incidents usually terrorize both the victims and other employees, especially those who know violent individual and are left to wonder how they failed to recognize the danger signs.

Some organizations report that employees, even those who weren’t hurt in an incident, exhibit PTSD-type symptoms following an incident. And the company’s reputation is often damaged, just from the publicity of the event.

One of the main controls that protect against a violent incident, is doing a Workplace Violence Assessment. This specialized risk assessment involves interviewing employees at all levels of the organization, looking at the OSHA guidelines, such as those detailed in OSHA 3148, (www.osha.gov/Publications//osha3148.pdf).

The assessment also includes making sure that every violent, or threatening incident gets reported in a standardized way, that all the incidents are tracked, and that there is a de-escalation process that can be easily followed to prevent someone from getting to a violent stage.

There are new programs available that automate the Workplace Violence Assessment process and make it into a simple and standardized
project. To review a standardized, data-based, Violence Assessment Report, go to: www.riskandsecurityllc.com/.