The Manitoba government announced last week the funding of enhanced training for 105 institutional safety officers (ISOs) in five of the province's largest hospitals, including Brandon Regional Health Centre (BRHC).  This in response to the growing concern of staff, patient and visitor safety when an agitated and/or intoxicated person is in the facility.

Regional Lead Corporate Services and CFO for Prairie Mountain Health, Dan McGregor, says the Brandon hospital is receiving funding for enhanced police training for 16 of their compliment of security guards. 

"Currently, we have four security guards on site at all times, so that funding is to do additional training to have a further scope of education and experience, and responsibility within those security guards," explains McGregor, "and certainly we're supportive of going down this path.  We want to ensure that our staff are feeling safe, and obviously our clients and patients and visitors."

"Anybody who's coming into the site, we want them to feel safe and we certainly wouldn't want anyone to feel hesitant to come into the site based on some of the more aggressive tendencies we're seeing in some of our visitors. I think it will be great to move this forward and we welcome this opportunity," he adds.

ISOs are trained in public safety and crime prevention, various de-escalation techniques, enforcement of provincial laws, arrests, searches and seizures, use of force and officer safety, note-taking, interview basics, court preparation and mental health awareness.  They are also licensed as security guards and in health-care environments have additional training which allows them to accept a mental health patient from police, then secure and protect them until seen by health-care professionals.

McGregor says they have already identified 20 of their current compliment of security guards who are eligible to take this training.  He notes training will begin in May with the first four trainees.

"Right now, we have four security guards on site 24/7 and I expect that we would continue with that four being in place," he says. "Having said that, as we have more that are trained hopefully the four will be ISO trained, but it will take some time to get to that point, so we might have a mix for a period of time as we get as many as we can trained up."

"Certainly, we're wanting to move this forward as quickly as we can," adds McGregor. "This has been a long way in the works.  It's not that we want these positions to have a lot of 'action' but sometimes it's a little bit of a deterrent as well, of seeing these positions in place at the hospital and so for patients and visitors, by feeling more comfortable by seeing these positions in place, and by them being available so that our staff feel comfortable, I see this as being really positive."

Please listen to more on this story with Dan McGregor below.

Additional training classes for ISOs are ongoing, with classes planned for over the next three months. In total, 105 ISOs positions will be filled, with successful candidates who have completed training and testing posted at Winnipeg's Health Sciences Centre, St. Boniface Hospital, Victoria General Hospital, the Brandon Regional Health Centre and the Selkirk Mental Health Centre.