When staff members become a security threat: Tough meetings that may turn ugly

Physicians and other practitioners in a hospital must routinely go through a process in which their credentials are assessed, their performance reviewed, and their privileges reassessed. The process can be stressful for practitioners. Ultimately, the decisions made during that process affect a practitioner’s livelihood. Fortunately, most practitioners are professional enough to handle setbacks and revoked privileges in a reasonable way. But these meetings do have the potential of eliciting strong, and possibly violent, behaviors. So how often are doctors security threats?

“Almost never,” says Russ Colling, MS, CHPA, CPP, security consultant at Colling and Kramer in Salida, CO. “But you know, it takes one … just because it hasn’t happened before doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take it seriously and decide what steps need to be taken.”