Case Study: Reflex Protect successfully helps Olympia hospital

February 05, 2019

Security personnel were called to a patient’s room in the tower of a major hospital in Olympia, Washington.

The patient had been tagged with a Code Silver upon admittance to the hospital (for firearm possession/threat), and when Security arrived, he was brandishing a weapon (I don’t yet know particulars of type) – reportedly swinging it dangerously -- first at the nurses who had been seeing to his care when he threatened to and then became actively violent, and then at other nurses called upon for backup.

Fortunately, no one had yet been injured when security arrived, but the patient continued his threatening behavior toward the security personnel and remained a danger despite their presence.

After admonishing the patient to put down his weapon and stop engaging in threatening, violent conduct, and upon his failure to comply, one security guard used his Taser laser to distract the subject, at which time the other security guard deployed Reflex Protect in a single, accurate stream directly into the subject’s face and eyes.

The subject was instantly blinded, and, within 2-3 seconds, incapacitated, in pain, had self-disarmed, and was no longer a threat to anyone.

The security guards proceeded to restrain the subject’s wrists, during which time the subject cried out in pain and begged to have the Presidia Gel removed from his face.

There were seven nurses in the room during and immediately after the RP deployment, and none of them nor either security guard felt any ill effects from the Presidia Gel or use of Reflex Protect.

Security indicated that, had they used the OC product they carried up to the time of their recent implementation of Reflex Protect, everyone in the vicinity (nurses, security, staff, and assailant) would have been negatively impacted and potentially even disabled by that OC deployment.

Further, staff would have been called on to decontaminate the patient’s room (an extensive task, per prior experience), and further clean-up might have been necessitated beyond the confines of the patient’s room.

As it turned out, there was no need to clean or decontaminate the patient’s room at all, due to the accuracy of the RP Presidia Gel deployment, which struck only the subject, causing no cross-contamination or collateral effect.

Security did, however, use Reflex Remove/NCS Fast to decontaminate the subject, indicating that the subject’s recovery time was definitely no more than a total of 15 minutes from the time of deployment, and possibly as little as 5 minutes from application of the decontaminate until the subject was no longer in the intense pain suffered in the immediate aftermath of the deployment.

All in all, security staff reported that the product worked precisely “as advertised” and the training they had received via the Reflex Protect online certification program had prepared them entirely for this real life product use.

Obviously, while we always hope a situation can be defused, to the extent that someone might have been hurt by the violent subject, we could not be more pleased that Reflex Protect did exactly what we invented it to do for the healthcare environment.

It stopped the violence.

It affected only the violent subject.

The extraneous effects of our product were minimal to nothing, clean-up was easy and rapid, the hospital’s basic operations were not affected or delayed, and even the aggressive subject himself was made to feel physically better within minutes of having been completely incapacitated.

Hospital staff were, in a word, thrilled.