The Spiritual Need of the Healthcare Organization

On the heels of the Covid-19 pandemic, it is important to reestablish spiritual health within the healthcare organization. This can be accomplished, in part, by reinforcing the necessity to control access into healthcare organizations and identify those persons seeking entry. This process promotes a feeling of security and safety for patients, visitors, and employees. Controlling access into and within a building or campus, as we have seen, thwarts the possible increase in contamination and infection. It reduces the opportunity for the commission of a crime or occurrence of a violent act. But most importantly, ensuring that all doors are locked and persons are properly screened promotes the personal wellbeing and spiritual health of an organization.

To be most effective, the access control process should be tied into the patient experience so that patients and visitors can navigate the healthcare process with little difficulty while feeling a sense of security. Patients, visitors and staff need to see and experience the security processes in order to feel safer, enhancing their personal, and the organizations spiritual health. This is especially true in the healthcare setting where patients and visitors have their minds focused on their or their family’s medical condition and not on the surrounding environment.

What does access control and identification have to do with the wellbeing of an individual and the spiritual health of an organization? It contributes to a culture of safety and security, thereby meeting the basic hierarchical needs of the patient, visitor and staff. A work environment that controls access and identifies outsiders provides peace of mind to patients, visitors and employees, thereby delivering spiritual health to the organization. This is self-evident when you examine Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. In Abraham Maslow’s 1943 paper “A Theory of Human Motivation,” Maslow developed levels of psychological needs that focused on the stages of human personal growth. Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” is based on the idea that all people have specific needs in their lives, and these needs are hierarchical, starting with the most fundamental and necessary needs and progressing to more intellectual needs. The most fundamental of the four basic needs are called “deficiency needs”— needs that are essential to our personal wellbeing. They are esteem, friendship and love, security and basic physical needs like water, food and shelter. According to Maslow, once physical needs are met, the individual’s safety needs take precedence and dominate behavior. In the absence of physical safety, people will experience stress or trauma. Maslow’s theory is relevant not only in an individual’s personal life, but their professional life as well. If an employee does not feel safe and secure at his workplace, then he may not reach his full career potential, contribute to the spiritual health of the organization and may even leave the organization to seek out a workplace that can meet their basic hierarchical needs.

Unfortunately, some healthcare organizations still cling to the idea that an open campus or facility is a positive approach to patient and employee satisfaction. Many hospital C-suites see controlled access as a “police state” placing an undue burden on employees, patients, and visitors. However, this mindset has changing, at least temporarily, since the advent of the Corona virus. Since the pandemic started hospital have restricted access having to lock entry doors or post a security officer to monitor access. The question is, have hospitals seen the benefits of controlled access, and will this trend continue after the pandemic subsides?

What’s your opinion, on controlled access within the healthcare facility and is Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” relevant to the access control conversation?