The Strike-Day Gate: One Guard, Ninety Visitors and an Inbound Ambulance
At 0715 on a Monday you are the only guard on the main gate of a 250-bed private hospital in a district town. The gate has one vehicle lane and a 1.2 m pedestrian wicket. Between 0700 and 0900 the normal load is 60-70 outpatients, 12 staff vehicles, two ambulance arrivals and three vendor vans. Today a transport strike has stopped buses, so by 0730 about 90 people, many elderly, are pressed outside the wicket; two of them are arguing loudly with the supervisor's stand-in. At the same moment a vegetable tempo stops squarely in the ambulance lane, a patient's relative insists on wheeling a chair out through the vehicle gate, and an ambulance siren is audible about 300 m away. You hold a visitor register, only 40 visitor passes, a hand-held metal detector that beeps intermittently, and a wireless set on which the control room has just asked for a status update. Your relief is due at 1400 and no second guard is rostered before 0900.
1. Set out the sequence of actions you would take in the next five minutes and justify the order.
Read the worked answer
Rank by consequence, not by noise. The loudest problem is the argument; the deadliest is the blocked ambulance lane, so it comes first.
- Radio the control room in one line - "Crowd approx 90, ambulance lane blocked, one guard, request second guard at 0800." Get the request on record early; a request made at 0732 can be audited later, a request remembered at 0900 cannot.
- Clear the ambulance lane. Ask the tempo driver to move to the vendor bay; if he refuses, note the registration and tell him the lane is being cleared for an ambulance and he must move. Do not leave the gate to argue - the lane is beside you.
- Announce and split the queue. Open the wicket for elderly and patients with appointment slips, send staff through the staff-ID lane, and use a rope or barrier to hold a single queue. One guard can manage one queue, not three.
- Downgrade the metal detector. Intermittent beeping with no repeatable pattern suggests battery or interference from trolleys, not a threat. Switch to hand search plus visual check rather than stopping the queue at every beep, and log the fault.
- Refuse the wheelchair politely. A chair in the vehicle lane during an ambulance entry is a collision risk; offer to keep the chair at the gate and have the patient brought to the wicket, or use the pedestrian ramp.
- Put the arguing pair away from the lane, handing them to the stand-in supervisor, not handling both the crowd and the argument alone.
2. Only 40 passes are available for about 90 visitors. How do you keep access control without creating a confrontation?
Read the worked answer
Control is the record, not the card. A pass is only useful if its number, time and host are written down; a queue with no record is worse than a queue with a slower record.
- Issue one pass per family or per patient, not per head. Ninety people may be 35-40 family units, which fits the stock.
- Use numbered temporary slips (cut from the register book if needed) carrying name, mobile number, patient's room or department, time in, and the guard's initials. The pass number goes in the register so a slip cannot be reused.
- Never allow tailgating through the wicket when the crowd pushes; stand at the wicket frame, not behind the table, so one person passes at a time.
- Tell the crowd the rule and the reason once, clearly, then stop repeating it - repeated explanation invites negotiation.
- Ask the control room for more passes and a second guard in writing on the log, so any later complaint about delay is answered by the record.
- Escalate, do not improvise a new rule. If the crowd becomes unsafe, hold entry and call the supervisor rather than abandoning the register to keep people moving.
3. What goes into the log and the 1400 handover?
Read the worked answer
Log only what you saw, did, and when. Facts survive scrutiny; opinions do not.
- Time-stamped entries: crowd estimate at 0730; ambulance lane blocked and cleared, with times; second guard requested at 0732; each pass range issued (e.g. 01-38); metal detector fault noticed and the workaround used; wheelchair request refused and the alternative offered; argument between named or described visitors and who took it over.
- Equipment status: detector beeping intermittently, passes remaining, wireless signal quality.
- Handover items: unresolved faults (detector battery), the tempo's registration if it was not moved, description of the two visitors who argued, pass stock left, and the fact that the second-guard request is still open.
Do not write "crowd was unruly" or "visitor was rude". Write "visitor raised voice, refused to give room number, moved away at 0741". A handover that lists tasks still open is what the next guard actually needs; a handover that lists feelings is not.