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Letter from the Chairman
Happy New Year
First, I'd like to thank everyone that assisted in bringing together the Conference in Birmingham in November last year. It was a great success with almost 100 delegates and 10 traders. The feedback from the delegates has been excellent and we are already planning for our Conference this year. More of that later.
This year and the next 4 years or so will clearly be a considerable challenge as we all contribute to reducing the NHS budget by £20bn. There will undoubtedly be compulsory redundancies, voluntary redundancies and mutually agreed redundancies across the board. In such times of financial difficulty it is not unusual for pressure to be put onto security budgets and for standards to fall. Equally, in times of recession there is plenty of evidence to suggest that crime increases. It's essential then that we, as an Association, continue to work together to ensure that healthcare security is not denigrated. Having spent over £2m on physical security measures at my Trust in the last 6 years there is no doubt in my mind that the best method of securing funding is by producing appropriate risk assessments, whether as an organisational risk assessment (an over view of the corporate risks), or by individual corporate or single issue risk assessments. These, supported as appropriate by crime reduction audits, CCTV audits, analysis of incidents, changes in legislation/guidance provide the evidence needed to help secure funding for essential security management work.
Several members have indicated that with tightening budgets it is becoming increasingly difficult to attend meetings away from their Trusts. With this in mind the Executive is reviewing the Constitution and considering ways that would enable the Association to continue to function with maximum input from its members for the benefit of all.
Finally, a great deal of time and effort has been given to the continued development of the Associations' website by Simon Whitehorn and Nick Lee. Simon will be circulating the first of this years Newsletters soon. Please do take a look at the website - it's there for your benefit. I might add a plea here - if you have any NHS LA Level 2 or 3 approved security related policies (Security, Physical Security, Violence and Aggression, Lone Worker, Lockdown etc) do please let Simon have them so that they can be included in the web library. Any other non-NHS LA related security policies and procedures would also be welcomed. To further assist members we will be creating a new section on the website library for risk assessments and again can I ask that you send recent examples of your own risk assessments to populate the library to help others from re-inventing the wheel.
I hope that you find the Newsletters, website and Twitter feeds useful. If you have any ideas on how we could improve the website, Newsletter or the Association in general please do not hesitate to get in touch.
Best wishes,
Peter
Peter Finch CPP AdCertED&CP NDipM FSyI FInstLM MCMI MIEM
NAHS Conference 2011
The association’s annual conference was again held at City Hospital in Birmingham hosted by our Chairman Peter Finch. We were again fortunate to have a number of first class speakers who covered a range of issues. The first speaker was Professor Martin Gill the Director of Perpetuity Research & Consultancy International Ltd. Martin started his session by espousing that Security cannot currently be considered to be a profession although he did mollify some of us present who may have bristled at this suggestion by pointing out that this is not to say there aren’t a great many professional people in the industry.
He went on to explain that a profession has to be distinct and provided 6 examples of why security is distinct from other service elements of a business he also suggested why security can be marginalised and one element that we can all take from Martin’s comments was that to be effective an organisations security strategy must relate directly to the organisations goals. Does yours?