Your security operations team has a lot to think about – physical safety of individuals, developing more efficient processes and procedures for day-to-day activities, continuing education and creating content – such as an emergency medical plan – to teach/inform the people you work everyday to protect, and determining what other safety measures can be put in place to safeguard the people and places that you and your team oversee.

All your hard work will hopefully reduce the number of preventable incidents, but medical events are often unpredictable and unpreventable, and can require immediate emergency medical assistance. This article will dig a bit deeper into the anatomy of an emergency medical response as it may occur within an enterprise setting and discuss effective ways to plan, communicate and respond when these incidents occur.

Build an Effective Emergency Medical Response Plan

Depending on whether you are safeguarding individuals in a corporation, members of the public or students at a school – and depending on your jurisdiction – there may be local law that requires a medical emergency response plan to be in place. For example, this law was just instituted for all elementary and secondary schools in Massachusetts in Spring 2012 and explains that each plan shall include:

(1) a method for establishing a rapid communication system linking all parts of the school campus, including outdoor facilities and practice fields, to the emergency medical services system and protocols to clarify when the emergency medical services system and other emergency contact people shall be called;

(2) a determination of emergency medical service response time to any location on campus;

(3) a list of relevant contacts and telephone numbers with a protocol indicating when each person shall be called, including names of professionals to help with post-emergency support;

(4) a method to efficiently direct emergency medical services personnel to any location on campus, including to the location of available rescue equipment;

(5) safety precautions to prevent injuries in classrooms and on the facilities; 

(6) a method of providing access to training in cardiopulmonary resuscitation and first aid for teachers, athletic coaches, trainers and other school staff, which may include training high school students in cardiopulmonary resuscitation; and

(7) in the event the school possesses an automated external defibrillator, the location of the device, whether or not its location is either fixed or portable and those personnel who are trained in its use.

Source: Massachusetts Legislature.

An essential part of planning for emergency medical response is the procurement and implementation of technology that can help individuals quickly reach security operations and local emergency assistance. Historically, this has been achieved with emergency call boxes and landlines, but increasingly mobile safety apps are being implemented because of their ability to perform many functions automatically – such as sending the location, identity and medical information of an individual to local responders in one-click.

In discussions with hundreds of security operations VPs, Directors, Managers and Dispatchers, I have discerned that the ability to locate the individual experiencing a medical emergency is paramount. Certain mobile safety technologies have advanced to the point where embedded indoor positioning systems can help a security operations team detect the indoor location of an individual requesting assistance – accurate to the building, floor and room indoors. This is critically important for medical emergencies where the caller losses consciousness, has the inability to speak verbally, or loses the ability to speak comprehensibly – in all these cases, security operations will still be able to direct responders to the correct location within a building.

For Emergency Medical Assistance, Communication is Key

When a medical emergency strikes, time is of the essence and the aim to reduce emergency response time is a priority. Once a connection has been established between the person requiring emergency medical assistance (the “caller”) and call taker, providing several options for communications can help ensure that the facts are transmitted quickly and reliably so that the call taker can take a decisive action as soon as possible. Voice has always been the standard for communications, however there are many circumstances where providing a text-based alternative can be valuable. For situations where a throat has seized or swelled, or other physical limitations prevent voice communication, a text-based instant-messaging alternative can prove extremely valuable for getting information to the call taker.

There should be technology in place that enables communication between the call taker and emergency responders – such as walkie-talkies or mobile phones; however, it is important that whichever technology is used, the voice-quality is intelligible and the signal remains in-tact at all times enroute to the individual experiencing the medical event.

The last main point here, is that the call taker is responsible for determining whether any further communication is required to other internal stakeholders or external EMS teams when coordinating the emergency medical response. If the medical emergency was caused by an event that has the potential to harm others, a duty of care exists to warm them using any means available, such as a mass notification system or other in-building systems that can warn others nearby of a potential danger.

Emergency Medical Response Best Practices

The following set of best practices is a good start for most organizations. By no means is this list meant to be exhaustive, but rather indicative of some of the elements to consider when building an emergency medical response system for your internal needs:

• Set service reliability standards, then meet them for emergency service (i.e. respond to life threatening emergencies within 5 minutes 95% of the time)
• Measure emergency response times accurately (i.e. measure in seconds, not minutes; from time call received to responders arriving on scene)
• Use deployment methodologies that match supply and demand on both a temporal and geospatial basis
• Realize that deployment methodology and response time service reliability are just as important as the medicine provided (after all, life-saving treatment is worthless if it is not provided in time)
• Leverage technology innovations to enhance decision support tools for making resource deployment decisions in real-time
• Recognize “generational differences” and how to overcome them to function as a team, as efficiently as possible
• Recognize that leaders and managers need training in leading and managing
• Run simulations periodically to ensure medical responders know procedures, how to navigate toward locations as efficiently as possible and how to handle situations

Some of the best practices listed here have come from a great presentation given by Jonathan Washko, President of Washko & Associates.

Remember: speak to your colleagues in similar roles, whether at events or conference, or have monthly or quarterly meetings so you can share information about how to manage medical emergencies. If you have any additional best practices to add, please share them in the comments below for benefit of all other readers.

Environmental Design, Education and Awareness

Many preventative actions can be taken to improve the probabilities of success when a medical event occurs within your jurisdiction.

The concept of environmental design is often applied to crime prevention (known as CPTED) and physical safety, but it can also play a role in designing spaces for improved medical response. In particular, environments can be “accessorized” or “enhanced” to be more accommodating to those experiencing severe medical events and to those responding to those emergencies. For example, buildings and campuses can enhance environmental design by:

• Ensuring there are accurate and accessible floor plans so that medical responders can find the person experiencing the medical event that they need to help;
• Improving ease of access for medical responders – such as providing a dynamically programmed or time-restricted access control key or card that can get them from an entrance/exit to the location of the medical emergency onsite to prevent locked doors from causing further delays;
• Increasing the number of AED and medical kits in high-traffic locations; and
• Adding more accessibility features for the physically disabled.

Beyond environmental improvements, enhancing education and awareness of how to monitor, report and manage a medical event – either your own or someone else’s – can drastically improve the probability of a successful outcome.

Education refers to what material is actually created to influence (change behavior) the way people prepare for and react to medical emergencies. This is the actual content that is produced for your target audience. Quality matters. Try to build content that is engaging. Content people will want to share with their colleagues and friends; this viral distribution will help you reach more people with less marketing effort.

Awareness refers to methods used to reach audiences – such as email blasts, posters, in-person information sessions, videos, presentations and other content posted on a website or intranet, social media, broadcasts on internal communities, or integrating this into company culture from the top-down.