Healthcare · Elopement · Instrument
Walk the exits. Then walk the information.
Part 1 is a quick walk of the doors. Part 2 isn’t a walk at all — it asks you to trace a single judgment through the building, which is the shape of the whole problem. About twenty minutes; it stages nothing and needs no clinician.
Nothing is stored. Nothing is sent. No email, no login — this sheet is yours.
Elopement · walk-and-trace
Nine things — the doors, then what they know
Note the answer, not a score. Nothing here asks you to make or judge a capacity determination, or to touch a patient’s clinical status.
Part 1 — the doors (fast)
1. Walk the unit perimeter. Count every way out — including the stairwell and the elevator lobby.
The ones nobody calls exits are the point.
2. Which are alarmed? Which are only alarmed after hours?
Note the gap between the two.
3. Follow an authorized employee through a controlled door. Did it close behind them, or could you have followed?
Tailgating is a door that works being used the way people actually move.
Part 2 — what the doors know
4. Pick a patient currently flagged as an elopement risk. Now find where that flag physically lives — chart, wristband, whiteboard, or a verbal handoff.
You can get the flag from the board without clinical knowledge. Then go find it.
5. Does the exit system know about that flag?
Yes or no. This one question is the whole page.
6. If that patient walks out the main entrance right now — what happens? Who is told, on what device?
Trace it to a person and a device, or to a hallway nobody is in.
7. If nobody acknowledges that alert, what happens next?
If the answer is “nothing,” you just found the escalation gap yourself.
8. Ask when a door alarm last fired. Then ask who acknowledged it and whether there’s a record.
A record of acknowledgment, or its absence — both are findings.
9. If your flagged patient turned up in your own ED as a walk-in, would anything connect him to the admission upstairs?
The AHRQ case, made into a question about your own building.
Nothing on this sheet asks you to make or evaluate a capacity determination, or to involve a patient’s clinical care. It traces whether a judgment already made reaches the door in time — observed on an ordinary day.