June 2022
Safety from violence
Working alone can be dangerous – especially with out-of-control citizens. There have been too many deaths and far too many dangerous incidents. New smart technology will not solve the problem by itself, but with systematic risk assessment, 63% of all cases can be predicted and prevented with educational intervention.
Read the exciting article about working with severely reactive citizens and the new app, which has been developed specifically for group homes, residential care facilities, nursing homes with dementia patients and psychiatric patients, etc.
Knowledge sharing is central to the care of our citizens. But also within software development. Also read the story of how our digitalization consultant and her father worked together to develop an app that provides better knowledge sharing – and thus safety for the staff.
Security and knowledge sharing go hand in hand
Right up in the red zone. We can all get there when we get really angry. But green-yellow-red is also an effective and well-known method for systematic risk assessment of citizens. Now a new app is coming that also supports knowledge sharing.
Systematic Risk Assessment of Vulnerable Citizens – BVC
(Brøset Violence Checklist)
Many skilled employees within the primary healthcare sector, both in municipalities, regions and especially staff within residential institutions and places of residence/group homes, work daily with risk assessment of citizens, also called BVC: Brøset Violence Checklist.
These are often citizens who, for example, are demented, mentally ill, developmentally disabled, etc. Several studies have been conducted that demonstrate that systematic documentation and especially sharing knowledge about the citizens' condition is a significant contribution to reducing the number of dangerous episodes. The National Board of Health describes, among other things, how a study in Norwegian hospitals has shown that BVC makes it possible to predict a violent incident with 63 percent certainty, while it makes it possible to predict the absence of a violent incident with 92 percent certainty. (National Board of Health and Welfare's method manual)
For one thing, systematic risk assessment can prevent violent episodes, but it also helps to give citizens a better everyday life. Because none of us want to be in the red zone all the time.
The new APP and IT solution from Pallas IT is now also adapted for smaller institutions.
Our experience is that risk assessment is often done manually. It can be quite impractical to put a red magnet next to a citizen who is extremely reactive,
says Sofie Hansen, a digitalization consultant at Pallas and the woman behind many of the ideas for the new app. “But the red warning color can be difficult to see for a colleague who is inside another citizen's home or in a completely different building,” she emphasizes.
Two meters tall, one meter wide with the consciousness of a 2 year old
Jan Hansen, who originally trained as a school teacher and has more than 25 years of experience working with challenged citizens in residential facilities and institutions, knows what he is talking about.
A particularly challenged citizen is 25 years old, strong as a horse, without language and often very violently reacting. He has the consciousness of a 2-year-old and also suffers from both very severe ADHD and autism. “He hits, bites, shouts – or tears the room apart”, says Jan Hansen. But Jan Hansen has also noticed that when the citizen has not had enough healthy food to eat and his blood sugar drops, the risk of a violent reaction is much greater. It is probably not so strange, because who does not know the commercial for Snickers, where the football players behave like an angry diva until they get something to eat.
The one with the food is just a small detail in a complicated picture about the citizen. But it means that when leaving a shift, it is important to note that the citizen, for example, did not eat bread for dinner – so that the morning shift has that information.
Jan Hansen says
Systematic Risk Assessment is based on the principles of triage or the traffic light method (green, yellow, red method) and the Brøset Violence Checklist (BVC) and consists of forms that help analyze the citizen's normal behavior, current state of mind and prescribe specific interventions that can deescalate conflicts.
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