You can't sell a secret: ways to demonstrate value and influence.

How does a security director demon- strate value and influence in an or- ganization? According to the authors, a security director's title or position in an organization's hierar- chy does not guarantee that he or she will demonstrate organizational value or influence. This can only happen as a result ofwhat the director does, how well it is done or in some cases what is not done that should have been done. In this article, they de- scribe some real life achievements ex- perienced at their organization to demonstrate security's value and influence.

Keeping off-site employees safe.

To help a hospital's home healthcare nurses better protect themselves against violence, the authors developed a training program that gave employees information on what to look for, what to do in an emergency and provided them with other policies and procedures to follow. In the article, they describe the use of role playing exercises and scenario-based instruction that allowed better retention on examinations, and also influenced the employees' attitude toward training positively.

Security management internship program: a great recruiting tool for your company.

A well thought out and managed internship program is easily a "win-win" situation, according to the authors, who established such a program for the security department of their hospital. The program benefits not only the students with gaining practical experience of the business environment, but also the colleges/universities in coordinating internship opportunities for its students and business organizations in a number of ways including the possible identification of potential young career candidates to augment their current workforces. The article is based on the authors' presentation at the ASIS International Annual Seminar in September 2012.

The keys to a successful security project.

Poor planning of a security project can result in cost overruns and, sometimes, an unsuccessful project, the authors report. Based on their experience in dealing with vendors, contractors, and management, they present in this article the planning steps that should be taken to insure successful completion of the project from its beginning to its integration.

Safe and secure handling of trauma patients.

In a society where 12-year-olds can get guns and use them, an emergency room at a pediatric hospital has to look at patient care from several angles. While a major focus should be on the treatment of the patients' immediate medical emergency and to support their recovery, one should also consider their overall safety from external risk

Staffing by the numbers: a statistical approach to staffing justication.

The article describes how a hospital's Protective Services Division, working closely with Human Resources, developed several recommendations to alter the current security coverage without sacrificing employee safety in order to minimize the use of overtime dollars. With a security department competing with many other divisions for the same dollar resources, organizations will not be willing in a tight market to support a department that does not demonstrate fiscal responsibility, according to the authors. Additionally, they state, security initiatives must be aligned with the strategic initiatives of the organization in order to be funded by senior leaders.

Aqueous phosphoric acid as a mild reagent for deprotection of tert-butyl carbamates, esters, and ethers.

Aqueous phosphoric acid (85 wt %) is an effective, environmentally benign reagent for the deprotection of tert-butyl carbamates, tert-butyl esters, and tert-butyl ethers. The reaction conditions are mild and offer good selectivity in the presence of other acid-sensitive groups, including CBZ carbamates, azetidine, benzyl and methyl esters, TBDMS, and methyl phenyl ethers. The mildness of the reaction is further demonstrated in the synthesis of clarithromycin derivative, in which a tert-butyl ester is removed in the presence of cyclic carbamate, lactone, ketal, acetate ester, and epimerizable methyl ketone functionalities. The reaction preserves the stereochemical integrity of the substrates. The reactions are high yielding, and the workup is convenient.

Method for determining the average degree of substitution of o-vanillin derivatized porcine somatotropin.

Electrospray mass spectral observation directly on a sample of a derivatized protein, such as porcine somatotropin (pST), affords a method for evaluating the degree of substitution of this protein. Derivatization of the lysine residues and the terminal amino residue here by formation of a Schiff base with a small aromatic aldehyde (in this case, o-vanillin) affords stabilization of the protein so that it may be used in a controlled release veterinary pharmaceutical formulation. This method permits direct observation of substitutions, optimization of manufacturing procedures for producing a commercial product, and permits quality evaluation of material.

Putting vendors to the test.

Replacing or upgrading security systems requires that all parties involved acceptably test each component of the system before the system is turned over to the owner. This process, called commissioning, according to the authors, has enabled their hospital to preempt problems that could otherwise have plagued new systems after installation.

Customer service for security staff the "CARES" way.

When a medical center establishes an institution-wide customer service strategy, how does its Protective Services Department develop a department-specific program which links to the umbrella program. The authors spell out the philosophy, elements and employee interactions of their department's customer service training program.

Identification of low-level degradants from low dose tablets.

A multifaceted approach was successfully used to identify three of four unknown degradants in degraded low dose tablets. Accelerated solvent extraction (ASE) was found to be an invaluable tool in this multifaceted approach. ASE was capable of extracting four individual degradants of an active pharmaceutical component from 10 tablets into 15 mL of solvent with approximately 100% recovery for each degradant. Using ASE instead of manual extraction led to the extraction and isolation of the degradants in 1 day instead of 7 days. One of the degradants was extracted by ASE, isolated by semi-prep HPLC, and identified by LC-MS and NMR spectroscopy. The structures of two of the remaining three degradants were confirmed by synthesis of authentic samples, while the fourth degradant is yet to be identified.

The dangers of home health.

Home health nurses can encounter dangerous situations in the field that are not faced in a hospital setting. This article describes a joint program by a medical center's security and home health departments to train and safeguard home health providers.

Pharmaceutical impurity identification: a case study using a multidisciplinary approach.

A multidisciplinary team approach to identify pharmaceutical impurities is presented in this article. It includes a representative example of the methodology. The first step is to analyze the sample by LC-MS. If the structure of the unknown impurity cannot be conclusively determined by LC-MS, LC-NMR is employed. If the sample is unsuitable for LC-NMR, the impurity needs to be isolated for conventional NMR characterization. Although the technique of choice for isolation is preparative HPLC, enrichment is often necessary to improve preparative efficiency. One such technique is solid-phase extraction. For complete verification, synthesis may be necessary to compare spectroscopic characteristics to those observed in the original sample. Although not widely practiced, an effective means of getting valuable structural information is to conduct a degradation study on the purified impurity itself. This systematic strategy was successfully applied to the identification of an impurity in the active pharmaceutical ingredient 1-(1,2,3,5,6,7-hexahydro-s-indacen-4-yl)-3-[4-(1-hydroxy-1-methyl-ethyl)-furan-2-sulphonylurea. Identification required the use of all of the previously mentioned techniques. The instability of the impurity under acidic chromatographic conditions presented an additional challenge to purification and identification. However, we turned this acidic instability to an advantage, conducting a degradation study of the impurity, which provided extensive and useful information about its structure. The following discussion describes how the information gained from each analytical technique was brought together in a complementary fashion to elucidate a final structure.

Better safe than sorry: one agency's successful safety and security strategies.

The Home Healthcare and Protective Services Departments of Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center (CCHMC) pooled their expertise to develop a comprehensive safety and security program for the visiting clinical staff. This article describes the program, various training sessions and modules, and the escort program provided by the Protective Services officers.

Nurses learn vital signs of safety.

Protecting home health nurses and other professionals is a growing problem for healthcare security. The authors present their recommendations for an effective home healthcare safety program.

Individualist and collectivist values: hypotheses suggested by Alexis de Tocqueville.

The work of Alexis de Tocqueville, the 19th-century social theorist who coined the term individualism, supplied a conceptual foundation for hypothesizing that individualism and collectivism, as value systems, should be directly correlated. In previous research (D. K.-S. Chan, 1994), individualist and collectivist values were negatively correlated in a sample of men, and in a combined sample of men and women (P. J. Watson, J. Sherbak, & R. J. Morris, 1998) these values were positively correlated. In the present study, a positive relationship was in fact observed in both men and women. Linkages with other measures of self and social functioning uncovered a few small associations of individualist values with maladjustment. Collectivist values predicted adjustment. These data confirm that individualist and collectivist values are compatible, just as Tocqueville had suggested, and that gender differences do not explain the conflicting results previously reported in this literature.