UNM Hospital staff undergoing workforce violence training

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.-Retired APD Commander Paul Szych led three days of intensive training for hospital staff. The goal was to help people spot and report potential for workplace violence.

“We should be putting more emphasis on predicting and preventing and avoiding events than allowing them to happen and reacting to them,” said Szych.

He said the training includes empowering employees to speak up in professional relationships and domestic ones.

“After we’ve had a mass killing event, when you look backwards, you almost always see report after report, incident after incident with somebody new, somebody had information, they just didn’t disclose it. Well, you know what, this is a shift in that this is a proactive attempt to get that information known,” Szych said.

So far, about 20 employees, including management, went through the training.

“We want our patients and our staff to feel safe. We want them to understand that we’re doing everything we can to try to prevent these things from occurring and trying to maintain a safe campus,” said Felix Funes, UNMH Executive Director of Security.

UNMH plans to make the training available to all 7,000 of its employees.