Today’s handover of a Safety Kiosk to the Tygerberg Hospital precinct will assist in the hospital’s ability to provide a safer environment for more efficient health service delivery.

This mobile, high visibility point of safety has been deployed to Tygerberg Hospital since the end of June 2015 and is manned by 10 Chrysalis Graduates as community liaison officers within the hospital and on the precinct, using the Community Safety Kiosk as a base for their functioning.                       

The effectiveness of the graduates is displayed in the statistics which show that they have assisted 638 members of the public within the first 2 weeks deployment.

The size of the hospital and design of the precinct poses a natural security risk and increases the opportunity for crime as criminals were often found to be aimlessly walking around the hospital or on the precinct looking for the opportunity to commit crimes. To negate this, the Chrysalis graduates have been deployed to focus on identifying those members of the public who seem to be unable to find their way around the hospital and precinct and assist them accordingly.

A natural consequence of this approach is that the ability of opportunist criminals to commit crime is largely diminished.

The inclusion of the Chrysalis graduates in the Tygerberg Hospital project, has largely contributed to the positive enhancement of the security resilience at Tygerberg hospital and on the precinct, whilst institutionalising the Community Safety Improvement Plan (CSIP) Strategic focus, “Security of Public Spaces”.

To ensure the graduates are properly equipped to perform duties within the hospital and on the precinct an induction programme was designed and presented to the graduates, after which they were issued with a CSIP reflector bib identifying them as community liaison officers.

The handover today forms part of the larger Safety Partnership launched in April this year where the Department of Community Safety’s Security Risk Management (SRM) division identified additional Western Cape Government sites to further help reduce opportunities for crime and anti-social behaviour, to create safer and more secure operating environments.

Safety starts with each and every one of us and I urge everyone who visits or works at the hospital to use the services of the Safety Kiosk and Chrysalis Graduates.

Issued by Western Cape Community Safety