Healthcare systems are responsible for securing their physical environments for the safety of patients, staff, management, visitors, and others. This task is complicated by the diversity and number of individuals interacting with their services, employees, and facilities daily. These touchpoints each represent a potential vulnerability that has a potential to turn deadly if appropriate security measures are not implemented and maintained. The need to manage these interactions while ensuring the seamless flow of operations requires healthcare institutions to staff their security departments adequately, provide them with sufficient resources and training, and adopt comprehensive physical security strategies.

Methodology

In late 2024, COSECURE Enterprise Risk Solutions conducted a benchmarking study researching healthcare security department staffing levels and composition. The research also sought to identify the different roles within healthcare security departments, department reporting structure, length of training received by uniformed security officers as new hire training, annually recurring training, and types of defensive weapons issued by the organization to its security officers. This whitepaper is drawn from that research and additional research conducted during 2019 and 2023 on the same subject.

This data was collected via a web-based survey tool distributed to health system security leaders via e-mail and posted in the discussion forums of both the International Association of Healthcare Security and Safety and ASIS International. Phone interviews and e-mail follow-ups were conducted with select respondents to clarify answers or request elaboration on points made.

Participants

Representatives from 53 healthcare systems responded and contributed their data to the survey. Not all of these responses could be used for all aspects of the survey. Some chose only to answer the questions about defensive tools usage and/or training and did not provide demographic data, so they were not included in the staffing benchmarks.

Click here to download the full 19-page analysis document.

If you have any additional comments or questions, feel free to reach out directly to Drew Necker, dnecker@cosecure.com.