“Our video has exonerated our security officers more times than it has shown them doing anything wrong,” says Paul Greenwood, Manager of Security and Safety at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto. “We’ve had blatant lies told against them and when we review the video we find nothing of the sort happened. It’s a nice feeling to know that video is there.”

St. Mike’s security department receives a lot of requests from individuals, lawyers and the police for video captured on the grounds of the facility which is located at Queen and Yonge Street. Due to the nature of the diverse clientele and neighbourhood it serves, there are typically two or three police cars at the hospital at any given time. If there is an allegation of abuse by police, or, if there is alleged abuse against police officers, the video is captured and stored in anticipation that it may be needed in the future.

“It’s not something formal we have in our retention policy now, but we do grab the video whether someone has a court order or not, just in case,” says Greenwood. “We had one incident where we dealt with an individual who had claimed he was injured by a security guard and escorted off our property. Luckily he came to us within our 31-day retention period so we were able to show him being spoken to and escorted out and there was no chance had been injured.”

The individual later admitted to other incidents where he had made similar claims against transit companies and taxis. His last words to Greenwood and his team was that he needed money.

“He made multiple calls to our claims department. That’s an ideal example of why we need to retain video. Slip and falls in the winter are a given and will happen in a building and we’re trying to protect against those. We also deal with mental health clients and others who don’t want to tell the truth. I’m all for keeping video for as long as we can,” says Greenwood.

At St. Joseph’s Health Centre in Toronto, any time an incident occurs the first step Noreen Jivraj takes is to advise her staff to capture the video in the event it is needed to help demonstrate the actual events.

“We specialize in mental health and have these types of allegations all the time. What I’ve told my security officers is they need to let me know whenever there’s a potential claim against them and we need to keep the video. This is what we do to try and protect ourselves,” says Jivraj, Manager of Emergency Planning and Security Services at St. Joseph’s.

So how long is long enough when it comes to retaining video surveillance footage at a hospital? What about the Ontario Privacy Commissioner’s guideline issued in 2007 that suggests retaining video for between 48 and 72 hours? Most security managers say that period is too short. So should privacy trump the need to retain video longer to protect a facility in the event of a lawsuit?

These are questions managers of security at four large Toronto hospitals have been debating with themselves and their legal and privacy teams since the Ontario Privacy Commissioner issued the guideline back in 2007.

“For me, this started in 2008 when the privacy office of the hospital contacted me to let me know my CCTV policy had to comply with the guideline issued by the privacy commissioner,” says Andrew Aris, Manager of Security Services at the Centre for Addiction Services and Mental Health (CAMH) in Toronto. “Do we need to comply with the guideline?”

Aris revised his policy to meet most of the issues in the guideline document but had some concerns about some of the items in the document — the main one being that the recommended retention period of 48 hours to 72 hours be the maximum for retention unless the information is specific to an incident or on-going investigation.

“I went to our privacy office and said I just don’t feel comfortable doing that,” says Aris.

“The industry standard is 30 days. I feel we are putting the hospital at risk if we only keep it for the 72-hour period. If an incident happens on the Friday of a long weekend the images are gone by Tuesday of the following week.”

Aris consulted with the hospital’s lawyers but they were inclined to agree with the guideline, and suggested 14 days should be the policy. Aris still felt it wasn’t long enough. So he started to reach out to his colleagues in other hospitals to see how they were handling the retention policy.

“We looked at an average of when request for video came in and it was typically at the four-to-five day period. Requests were generally coming in to request to view video in that time frame. If we went with a 72-hour policy then this information would be lost and we wouldn’t be able to provide the information,” he says.