What is needed to combat low-level disturbances in hospitals is not more security staff but better legal powers, a Department of Health consultation document suggests.
The consultation paper Tackling nuisance or disturbance behaviour on NHS healthcare premises quotes an unnamed Local Security Management Specialist within a health body. He and his security staff often felt like ‘toothless tigers’ when waiting for the police to attend and remove nuisance individuals: “The police are under constant pressure to deal with serious incidents. When we request assistance in the removal of individuals, more often than not this is a low-profile police response and we can end up baby-sitting these individuals for hours before we are able to remove them with police assistance”.
You may say, what about the Public Order Act, already in law? and ASBOs? But according to the DoH’s document, some behaviour ‘may not satisfy the threshold for the public order offences but nevertheless have the potential to adversely affect the ability of NHS staff to deliver healthcare’.
The document suggests two options: “The first option is to increase the provision of security staff within the NHS. While such investment would be welcomed, employing extra security staff would, at best, act as a visible deterrent and reduce the potential for crime to occur. However, the problem would still remain that security officers have no effective powers to remove a person from NHS premises.” Instead, the document leans towards new legislation to create an offence of causing a nuisance or disturbance on NHS premises, with a power for ‘certain NHS employees’ to remove the person creating the nuisance or disturbance. The new power would cover people making a noise, refusing to leave, and people complaining for no reason.
These powers would be voluntary – probably the ones using them would be the Local Security Management Specialist or someone he nominated, it is suggested – and would require signage and staff training. The document admits to difficulties – what if someone making a disturbance is drugged or drunk, or has had distressing news, or needs medical treatment? As reported in Professional Security in May, there have been high-profile cases where people have caused trouble at a hospital, police have been called, but the trouble-maker died because neither police nor medics saw the drunk or aggressive unco-operative person was unwell. On the other hand there is safety of staff to consider; hence the document says security staff removing the trouble-maker must be ‘specifically trained in physical intervention techniques to required competencies’.
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