Beyond Security: Creating Safe, Caring Spaces

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In this episode celebrating Healthcare Security and Safety Week 2025, host Dr. Elizabeth Harry talks with Brian Uridge, Director of Safety and Security at Michigan Medicine. Uridge shares his journey from community policing to health care security and explains how relationship-based safety practices strengthen well-being across the organization. 

From de-escalation training to canine therapy and mobile duress technology, Uridge reveals how his team blends compassion, trust and innovation to make Michigan Medicine safer for all. This inspiring conversation highlights how connection and presence are just as vital to security as any piece of equipment.

Transcript

Elizabeth Harry, M.D.:

Hello and welcome to Well-Being at Michigan Medicine Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Liz Harry, and today we're celebrating Healthcare Security and Safety Week 2025 with Brian Uridge, the director of Safety and Security at Michigan Medicine. Brian provides profound insight into ensuring safety on both a physical and holistic level, enhancing wellbeing for employees and the organization as a whole. Brian currently serves as a senior director at the University of Michigan Department of Public Safety and Security and oversees Michigan Medicine Safety and Security. Brian retired as the assistant chief of the Kalamazoo Department of Public Safety in Kalamazoo, Michigan after 26 years. He's the recipient of the Kalamazoo Public Safety Medal of Valor and Kalamazoo Public Safety Lifesaving Award. Brian, thank you so much for joining us today.

Brian Uridge:

Thank you for having me.

Elizabeth Harry, M.D.:

So we've talked about this extensively in the past, and I was wondering if you could share with our listeners if there was a moment or experience that first sparked your passion for safety and health care.

Brian Uridge:

Well, there certainly was. And so when I was in Kalamazoo Public Safety, one of my many jobs was the community outreach piece, and I was our liaison with Bronson Health System, so I would work with them on all of their major projects as their law enforcement counterpart. So the first thing that we did was we worked with Bronson Health care to put police in the health system, and that was primarily in their emergency room. And what we realized quickly was that we started by putting officers in on overtime and then quickly realized that they needed to be a full-time position so that they could create a relationship with staff so that it was the same person every single day. And as I built those relationships with Bronson, I realized when I retired that this is something I wanted to do full time.

Elizabeth Harry, M.D.:

Wow. So if we shadowed you for a day and you started to talk about relationships and the relationships between your officers and the community that they're serving. So if we shadowed you for a day or we shadowed one of these officers, what do you think would surprise us most about health care safety work?

Brian Uridge:

Well, if you shadowed me, I would tell you that you would find that my favorite thing to do is to way-find people within the health system. So the minute you spend any time in the health system, you quickly realize that so many of our patients and visitors are lost. And probably the most fun I have, and I do it multiple times a week, is everyone knows that look. And I walk up to someone and say, "Where you need to go?" And instead of telling them where to go, I walk them to their destination. And then while I'm walking them to their destination, I talk to them about where they're from, what's the weather like there, and build that relationship with them. It is absolutely so powerful.

And what we try to do at DPSS is actually make it so that all of our guest services and all of our security understand that that's your primary job. And to give you an example of how much it works, we had an example where a visitor, a visitor was lost, and all we did was walk them to their destination. But while we were walking them to their destination, we chatted them up, we talked about where they're from and what brings them here, and we laughed and we had a great conversation. That visitor wrote a handwritten letter, a handwritten letter thanking us for walking them to their destination. Now, that's such a powerful impact that someone took the time to write a handwritten letter for simply that non-traditional public safety interaction, which I believe is so powerful.

Elizabeth Harry, M.D.:

Wow. Help me connect that to safety and security in hospitals. What is it that most people don't realize about the importance of building these kinds of relationships?

Brian Uridge:

Well, unfortunately, there's some horrific stats about health care. And we know that 72% of all violence, according to OSHA, 72% of all violence in any workplace occurs in a health care setting. So first of all, we are in an environment where there is more verbal escalation, there's more physical violence. And that raises both the risk of our staff and the anxiety of our staff. And then obviously what we see in the media today with some of our active shooter events, the anxiety of our patients and staff and our visitors is quite high. I even had one occasion where I had an elderly patient call me on the phone and ask me, she asked me if it would be safe to come to the health system because she was that concerned.

Elizabeth Harry, M.D.:

Wow.

Brian Uridge:

So that's where, as you and I've talked before, whether it's security, whether it's our law enforcement partners that work in the health system, we've got to focus on being ambassadors first and security second, meaning we have to do that nontraditional outreach where we focus on how can we make you safe? But just as importantly, how can we make you feel safe? And you make people feel safe by building relationships, by understanding what they're going through, by looking at it through their lens so that you can help work to keep them safe.

Elizabeth Harry, M.D.:

So it's a huge mental model. It's sort of a way of looking at health care safety and security in hospitals. And so I'm curious, as you are building your teams, as you're training and creating this culture that the people on your team can then carry forward this, what is one leadership practice that you've used to keep your team motivated and resilient even in tough situations, and to really help anchor them in these principles?

Brian Uridge:

Well, that is a great question. And it takes daily interaction. It's not something that you can do by email. First, it's about who you recruit, who you hire, how you train them, and how you incentivize them. And I'll go back to Kalamazoo Public Safety. When I was in Kalamazoo, I'll never forget, my aha moment was I was in a neighborhood meeting and the meeting was about the crack cocaine problem in an area of Kalamazoo. And I realized as the leader in the neighborhood was talking, she knew that we were not going to totally get rid of the crack cocaine problem, but she wanted to have a relationship with the police and trust us that we were both moving in the same direction.

So when I retired and I got into health care, as I started going to huddles, I remember thinking, "Wait a second. A huddle is the same thing as a community meeting." And the principles that work in community policing and community engagement are the same principles that work in health care, meaning build trust, build relationships. And then one of the tenets, if you will, that we always say is that health care is a community. Every single hospital is its own community, and every floor is a neighborhood. And the only way you keep a neighborhood safe is by understanding what the problems are in that neighborhood.

The issues that occur in adult emergency are different than what occur in psychiatric emergency, so we have to understand that you have to work with those units and build that personal relationship. And that's really what we try to instill in all of our officers is the minute you have it, if Liz calls us and she has a problem, our philosophy is it does not matter where you are in the State of Michigan. We will physically drive to where you are at, meet you in person for coffee, understand your issues, and work with you to solve them.

Elizabeth Harry, M.D.:

Wow. I mean, we were just talking beforehand at this day and age, that level of in-person presence is not common. And so how do you keep your team motivated around that sort of showing-up mentality?

Brian Uridge:

Well, one of the ways is obviously you and I've talked about it, if you're familiar with the biweekly update, we send out that biweekly update. And the primary purpose of the biweekly update is to create a sense of community. It's to put a face on public safety. It's to let the people know, "Okay, these are the people that are working to keep you safe, and this is what really drives them." Part of what we also try to do is we try to recognize the amazing actions of our officers every two weeks. So we work to not only recognize our officers and incentivize them, but also we try to build a culture where if security officer Liz sees another security officer doing something great, that she calls him or her out and says, "Brian did something really great." And so we try to continue that culture of exceptional experience, non-traditional context and reward people in that sense.

Elizabeth Harry, M.D.:

Well, I love the positive focus on what your team is providing and seeing people on the team and really seeing them for the work they're doing, the way that they're showing up. I'm curious how you and your team create trainings and skills for the people that you're serving to help them be able to navigate our current climate, such as things like de-escalation and things like that. How do we expand the skill set outside of just your team to make it so that our local leaders and other folks feel comfortable in the same way that you're describing?

Brian Uridge:

So, great question. And training's probably one of my biggest passions. And we've had incredible success, and it goes back to relationships. So, years ago, two quick examples. We obviously have a great deal of violence that occurs in both our adult emergency and our psychiatric emergency areas, so we worked with nurse educators to develop and design specific training focused on situational awareness, proxemics, and de-escalation to develop training for those particular units.

So in the one that we did for psychiatric emergency, we had physicians assist. We worked with social workers, nursing and security together. We trained all of those entities together. We used, with the permission of OGC, we were able to get videos of actual assaults that occurred within the health system, obviously taking care to make sure we blurred out any identifiers. And then from there we developed scenarios with nurse educators. And what we found was, and this was powerful, we had a 46% reduction in assaults on nurses in the following nine months from the training. So unbelievably powerful.

And then one more quick example is we have obviously a lot of staff that do home health visits. Well, we all went, we built relationships with home health. We all went and did ride-alongs, and we said, "You take us where you feel least supported, whether that's a rural area or an urban area." We learned what they did. We then helped design training where we actually went and got empty apartments. We got role players and we used scenarios that the home health care worker said, "This has occurred to me." And again, the training was based on situational awareness, proxemics, and de-escalation. We did things like vehicle awareness and preparedness, what to have in your car.

The results were incredible. We had one nurse who had been a nurse for over 30 years and she said, "Oh my gosh, this was so powerful. I'm so grateful for this training." And she actually sent that to me in an email. And I always tell people, "That's better than a paycheck. When you get feedback like that, that's better than a paycheck."

Elizabeth Harry, M.D.:

Wow. It's amazing. And it's so important because it does impact people's psychological safety at work, their desire to come to work, especially if they've been someone that this has happened to. And so can you also share a story of where maybe not just training, but also maybe a policy that was implemented, either reduced stress for those on the job or improved wellbeing?

Brian Uridge:

Well, and I think when I look at... I can't speak to a specific policy. I can tell you some enhancements that have made a really big impact. One in particular is we are piloting mobile duress systems. And what that is, it's a little quarter-sized button. And what it does is the nurses wear it, and in the event that there's a escalating patient, they can push it. And what it does is it tells us the floor that they're on and the room that they're in, and it decreases our response time. So although it's only being piloted with a small amount of nurses, we have found great success in certain instances where it's allowed us to improve our response time and obviously enhance safety. So from a technology perspective, that's great.

And then one other technology that people don't even know exists that we have right now is we have around the health system on the exterior, we have cameras with analytics. These are the behind-the-scenes technology that our staff never even know about that exist.

Elizabeth Harry, M.D.:

It's amazing the links that you and your team are going to make sure that people feel your presence, feel the presence of your team, feel those relationship-building interactions, but then also that you're trying to really understand what the needs are of the local units. And it sounds like the needs vary. That for this home health person or person that's going in doing home visits, it might be very different than in the psychiatric ed, etc. How do you gather data to understand then the efficacy of these interventions across all these really disparate neighborhoods as you call them?

Brian Uridge:

Great question. So there's multiple ways. We actually have a robust workplace violence prevention team, and it's multidisciplinary. So we have physicians, we have obviously law enforcement and security. We have leaders from every single area that are part of a workplace violence leadership team, and then they lead different areas of multidisciplinary workplace groups which help design, "Okay, what should we do here?" So we hear from those stakeholders.

But then another example is this Wednesday, so in a couple of days we will have an in-person town hall with all of our adult emergency staff members, whomever wants to come. And that'll be a multidisciplinary group. People from OGC, we'll have physicians, we'll obviously have security and law enforcement. And the whole idea there is to understand how can we support our adult emergency clinical staff members better? How can we understand better what they're going through?

And then the other part of that that people don't realize that we do is we do trend analysis. So we want to look at what point in the interaction are the assaults occurring? Is there a particular time of day? Is there a particular hour a day? Do we have specific patients that have assaulted our caregivers more than other patients? So those are the type of things.

And then we look at, and this is a whole other area, threat assessment, where oftentimes our physicians, are targets of threats, whether it's through the patient portal, whether it's through emails, and that's a whole other area where we do behavioral threat assessment and management of those particular threats.

Elizabeth Harry, M.D.:

Wow. I mean, there's a whole science behind this, it sounds like, and really understanding when that tipping point is that sort of escalation happens, and then things tip over. If you were speaking to someone who was listening that might not have someone with your expertise at their organization, what would you say are the top couple things to look out for that are top contributors to violence risk, and where should leaders start in trying to address this issue?

Brian Uridge:

Well, that's a great question. What we always offer is we've met with other multiple other health systems, some that may not have the same resources. And we're always happy at Michigan Medicine at DPSS to sit down and talk about things that work for us, how to identify warning behaviors, how to identify behaviors of concern. First and foremost, we've met with multiple different health systems from across the nation to explain how we do things. And honestly, we learned just as much by talking to those health systems as well because they're doing something that perhaps we're not.

But when it comes to threat assessment, that comes back to what we started with, which is that relationship piece, which is Liz has to be able to trust Brian that I'm going to follow up and do the best I can get the resources in place to support you and your team when somebody has either made a comment that could be a direct threat or perhaps they made a couple of statements that are concerning that make you think, "I'm a little concerned for my safety or the safety of my team." But again, it all comes back to where it started, which is that non-traditional relationship-based security.

Elizabeth Harry, M.D.:

I love that. Where did you first get introduced to that concept?

Brian Uridge:

Well, I would love to say it was my idea, but it wasn't. So, actually, I had so many great mentors that I learned from in Kalamazoo Public Safety. And this is a really powerful story. One day we started a new initiative in Kalamazoo where we asked every officer every day to go out and do 20 minutes of foot patrol, not to make an arrest, not to write a ticket, simply go out and do 20 minutes of foot patrol with the focus just to build relationships. It was so powerful the first day we did it, many people had never seen it before. And what we found is we had one person who actually called 911 and asked if there was a crime going on in their neighborhood because they were so flabbergasted to see police officers on foot. But we know that when you look at the data that although foot patrol may not reduce crime specifically, what it does is it builds trust with communities. It also helps police officer morale because they realize that the world's full of really good people.

So that type of non-traditional policing, I learned it from people in Kalamazoo and simply applied it here. And then what we would do is we would track that, we would track that data just like let's say you would track traffic tickets, we tracked non-traditional each time our officer helped carry groceries into a house, every time they helped fix a flat tire, every time they gave someone a ride, they would track that, so we could understand what impact are we having on the community. Instead of just tracking the arrest data and the ticket data, let's track customer service, and then let's make sure we focus on the three things, compassion, customer service, and creating an exceptional experience. Those three things are the most important things we need to do in public safety, whether you're a police officer, whether you're a firefighter, whether you're a security officer, whether you work in guest services, those three areas are the number one things we should be focusing on.

Elizabeth Harry, M.D.:

Wow, I love that. And so this foot style presence, are the officers encouraged to have a certain number of positive contacts per shift or they just sort of find someone that looks like they might need help with their groceries? Or how do you direct them to do that?

Brian Uridge:

So it started years ago. When we started here years ago, we asked them to do two contacts per day. Go meet a staff member that you've never met, engage them in a conversation about the weather, about anything, but it has to be someone you've never met. Then engage a patient or a visitor that you've never met and do the same thing. Just chat with them. If you've ever read the book, and I had a physician give me this book, so really it came from her. If Disney Ran Your Hospital: 9 1/2 Things You Would Do Differently. So when you look at that book and you read it, it's an incredible book. Page three of that book says that the number one patient need is assurance. That's the number one patient need. And we know that an EVS employee has more face time with a patient than a doctor does. So let's train our EVS. Let's train our public safety officers. Let's train our entrance services to create that exceptional experience. So that's how we started.

And then we also tried to highlight when our officers would create some type of exceptional experience. And a powerful one is we had someone who had lost a bear, like a stuffed bear in the parking ramp. Our officers on their own, they found the bear, which was great, but then they had the number of the family, they texted the family, they put the bear in front of the survival flight helicopter. And it was crazy because all of a sudden the family had a fictitious... They were like they showed the kids, "The bear's coming back on the helicopter." So powerful. But they did that on their own, and that's how you create that exceptional experience.

Now, imagine what they're saying about Michigan Medicine, and I believe it's the Barral Institute that said, "72% of people make their health care decision based on the recommendation of a family or a friend, regardless of what medical condition they have." So if we can get everyone in our health care community, all 30,000 or 40,000 employees, focus on exceptional experience, compassion and customer service, ambassadors first, physician second, ambassadors first, security second. And if we can get everyone to do that, we can change a culture.

Elizabeth Harry, M.D.:

Wow, that's amazing. So I want to spotlight a theme, and I know that you have talked about united to lead and protect, and I'm curious what this means to you personally and how your team brings it to life at Michigan Medicine.

Brian Uridge:

Well, I remember, and this was my first, I was in college, it was my first interview for a police officer job. I was a senior in college, and they said, "We want you to listen to this sentence and then tell us what it means to you." And it said, the sentence was, "A police department is only as effective as the community in which it serves." And they said, "Well, define that sentence." And of course, I struggled. I was 21 years old and I stumbled over the answer. But now that I look back, that's what I believe. True security is not about having guns or tasers or things like that. It's about having an effective community that works with one another, that trusts each other, that understands what really needs to happen, that works together towards a common problem.

And that's when you talk about that united piece, that's the most important piece right there. And it goes back to that sentence that they asked me in my first interview. It's about an engaged community. It's about how do we train our community to understand that situational awareness is the most important thing we should have to understand to identify problems ahead of time, and then be able to have confidence in security to call us and say, "Okay, we're here to help."

Elizabeth Harry, M.D.:

Yeah, I love that. And one of the things that you're hitting on that I've been thinking as you've been talking is on this presence, this real focused presence, that you're not only physically present, which is important, but that you're emotionally and cognitively present as well, that you're able to connect with the person you're talking to and you're able to sort of attend to the environment around you and have this situational awareness.

And one of the things that I think a lot about is attention and how fragmented our attention is because of how much is coming at us. And we were talking a little bit about social media before we started, but I'm curious how you think about creating the environment in which your team and others, all of us as ambassadors can be present, can be focused to have that situational awareness, to have that connection when there's so much coming at us in terms of things that are kind of tugging at our attention, either at the phone in our pocket or other things we're worried about.

Brian Uridge:

Well, you just hit the nail on the head. The problem is the phone's not in our pocket. And the number one thing that is causing us not to be engaged, not to be present is that phone, is that social media. We are bombarded. And look at the two of us. We've been sitting in this room for 30 minutes. No one here has their phone out. And it's such an engaging conversation where we're reading each other's body language and we're having a good give and take. You saw me when I was crying a minute ago. Well, that's the important piece.

And that's where, in fact, we have designed a training called Situational Awareness and Personal Safety. It's an in-house training. It's designed to keep you safe before work, during work, and after work. And when we start the training, we show videos and that the whole idea is phone use, when to use your phone, how to use your phone, not to walk with your phone, travel safety, how to avoid being the victim of a pickpocket. And that was an incredible in-house training that we developed to help keep people safe.

Elizabeth Harry, M.D.:

Yeah, it's amazing. I mean, I didn't even think about that, but your divided attention puts you at huge risk if you're in a vulnerable situation and kind of makes you a target, I would imagine.

Brian Uridge:

Correct.

Elizabeth Harry, M.D.:

So it sounds like there's really a shared sort of mental model that you and your team have around this partnership between vigilance and empathy, sort of balancing healing spaces where everybody can kind of be an ambassador with really smart, technologically equipped design and learning from our peers, but also offering knowledge to our peers. It's really just amazing. And I'm so grateful as someone that works here and also gets to partner with you in terms of how much you and your team are doing to really advance the experience of the people that work here at Michigan Medicine, not only by making it feel safer to be able to practice here, but also by helping us continue to build a stronger community, which I just think is amazing.

Brian Uridge:

Well, thank you. And that reminded me of after we had the meeting in your office, I came away, I told my staff, "I just had the best meeting because it wasn't about data. It was about how can we work together to get our community, to make them safer, to make them feel better, to be more engaged, to have a better work-life balance?" And I went and told my directors, "I just had the best meeting." But that's really what it's about. And what we say is that we have three pillars of security, if you will, and we put in the bottom of the bi-weekly update every two weeks.

First and foremost is trust. Everything focused on relationships, follow up, understanding where you're coming from, build trust. Number two is training, scenario-based training. If you've ever heard the saying, I think it came from a Navy SEAL. "You don't rise to the occasion. You will always sink to the level of your training." So we need to work with, and I always say nurse educators, because we have so many great nurses who are so well-trained, work with our clinical staff to develop high-speed training. That helps two things, keep our staff safe, but make sure they feel empowered and safe.

And then finally, the final pillar is technology, which is use technology that really helps, again, reduce risk and anxiety. And a great example of that is when people don't understand, but it's our canine team. We have canines that they're trained in pet therapy, they're trained in explosives detection, they're trained in firearms detection. They can track, but the number one thing that they do is they make people feel really good. They walk through our waiting rooms and the kids and the adults get to pet them. The staff get to pet them, and you watch the anxiety come down. Their impact on violence reduction is incredible. And for staff satisfaction, I've never seen anything like it.

Elizabeth Harry, M.D.:

Well, I know I love when they come by, and I have seen them multiple times. Thank you so much, Brian, for sharing such valuable insights with us today and thinking about how safety isn't just preventing harm, but it's really about creating workplaces where people feel supported and valued and able to thrive. And I just love the holistic view.

I am going to tuck away the nugget about the phone and think a little more about that, because I think this attention piece is really important. And I worry that it's having an impact not only on our ability to have that situational awareness, but really to build those connections. We're sort of walking past each other in the halls instead of connecting with one another. So I'd love to think more about that with you all.

Healthcare Security and Safety Week 2025 reminds us that when we're globally united to lead and protect, we can build safer, healthier workplaces for everyone. Thank you for listening to the Well-Being at Michigan Medicine Podcast. And thank you for coming, Brian.

Brian Uridge:

Thank you.