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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First, we would like to express our deep gratitude to all healthcare security professionals. They do amazing work under uniquely stressful circumstances, and that has never been more true than during the past few years. Second, we want to thank those who took the time to respond to the crime survey so that their fellow practitioners could benefit from the insights and benchmarking opportunities that this report is able to offer. And third, many thanks to the staff of IAHSS for all their work to support not only the Crime Survey, but the healthcare security sector, as a whole.

INTRODUCTION

The International Association for Healthcare Security and Safety (IAHSS) Foundation was established to promote the welfare of the public through education, research, and the development of a healthcare security and safety body of knowledge. The IAHSS Foundation promotes and develops research into the improvement of healthcare security and safety and provides scholarships to promote professional development in the sector. For more information, visit www.iahssf.org.

The 2023 Healthcare Crime Survey was commissioned under the IAHSS Foundation’s Research and Grants Program. The purpose of the Crime Survey is to provide healthcare security professionals with an understanding of the frequency and nature of crime in hospitals. Hospital security leaders throughout the United States were invited to participate. If the respondent was responsible for more than one hospital, we asked that one survey be completed for each facility.

As with prior Crime Surveys, the 2021 edition collected information on ten types of crimes:

  • Murder
  • Rape
  • Robbery
  • Aggravated Assault
  • Simple Assault
  • Burglary
  • Theft
  • Motor Vehicle Theft
  • Vandalism
  • Disorderly Conduct


To promote consistency in the answering the questions, the survey included the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Uniform Crime Reporting definitions. The definitions for each crime can
be found in Crime Survey questions in the appendix.

As in recent years, this year’s survey also asked questions about security staff size, patient elopements, the presence of an inpatient psychiatric/behavioral unit, the use of threat management teams, the use of visitor management programs and the use of the Workplace Violence Typology in compiling incident statistics. In addition, for the first time, the survey asked respondents to assess on a five-point scale how easy or difficult it was to retain a full, qualified security staff.

For the 2023 Healthcare Crime Survey, 192 usable responses to the core questions were received. (This was down from 227 in the previous year and 269 in each of the two years before that.) In general, a response was considered usable if the respondent provided data for most or all of the crime questions and the hospital’s bed count. Bed counts were necessary as the Crime Survey has long used this number to gauge hospital size and to calculate crime rates.

All of the data reflect incidents that occurred during the 2022 calendar year.