See the pattern.
Protect the person.
Stalking rarely arrives as one unmistakable event. Healthcare leaders can connect repeated behaviors, preserve privacy, and complete coordinated safety actions without taking control away from the survivor.
Awareness must become an operating system.
January 2026 marks the twenty-second annual National Stalking Awareness Month. The Stalking Prevention, Awareness, and Resource Center, known as SPARC, calls communities to “Know It, Name It, and Stop It.” For healthcare leaders, the month requires more than awareness. It requires a coordinated system that protects patients, employees, clinicians, students, and visitors without taking control away from the survivor.
A message, gift, unexpected visit, or account alert may appear minor when viewed alone. Repetition, escalation, context, and the resulting fear or safety concern reveal the pattern.
2026 National Day of Action for Stalking Awareness. The #SparkleAgainstStalking campaign is specific to January 18, not the theme for the full month.
Connect what isolated reports conceal.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention describes stalking as a pattern of unwanted harassing or threatening tactics that causes fear or safety concerns. Use behavior-based questions instead of requiring a survivor to supply the correct label.
Common tactics can include repeated calls or messages, following or watching, appearing at a person’s home or workplace, leaving unwanted items, using GPS technology, and misusing cameras, software, or social media to monitor someone. A person may not identify the behavior as stalking.
Make the first conversation safer.
The first response can widen or close the path to help. Begin in a private setting, when safe, explain confidentiality and its limits, and preserve choice wherever law and immediate safety allow.
Safe-contact protocol
Ask how and when it is safe to make contact.
Confirm whether voicemail, text, email, portal notifications, mailed documents, or calls to emergency contacts could create risk.
Validate the concern and clearly explain available options.
Use a warm referral and confirm ownership of the next step.
Pair respect for autonomy with prompt access to safety expertise and safe follow-up.
Build a record without building new risk.
Connected documentation may expose a pattern that separate encounters hide. When safe, a documentation log can capture these operating fields.
When the behavior or communication occurred.
Where it happened, including virtual and physical settings.
Direct observations and the survivor’s own words.
Call, message, visit, account, device, platform, or third party.
Who observed the behavior and how they can be reached safely.
Messages, voicemails, screenshots, or account records, when safe.
The resulting concern, safety impact, action taken, owner, and safe follow-up.
Documentation boundary: Record direct observations without speculation, blame, or unsupported conclusions. Clinicians should document information relevant to care according to clinical, privacy, and legal standards. The health record should not become a general evidence repository. Never ask a survivor to confront the person, maintain unsafe contact, or retrieve information from a compromised device. Define where clinical, workplace, security, and digital-evidence records belong, who may access them, and how long they are retained.
Move one concern through one accountable pathway.
A survivor should not have to navigate disconnected departments alone or repeatedly retell the experience. Build a route that connects expertise while preserving privacy and choice.
Recognize
Connect repeated behaviors across time, settings, channels, and departments.
Listen
Provide privacy, explain confidentiality, validate concern, and honor safe-contact preferences.
Coordinate
Connect care, advocacy, operations, and safety partners through one pathway.
Complete
Give every agreed action an owner, deadline, verification method, and safe follow-up.
Clinical care + advocacy
Care, validation, trained victim services, and safe referral.
Survivor choice + safety
The plan adapts to the person. The person should not have to adapt to organizational silos.
Privacy + compliance
Safe contact, directory restrictions, records, and lawful access.
Security + facilities
Visitor controls, parking, transportation, worksite, and after-hours response.
HR + campus partners
Schedules, accommodations, nonretaliation, student support, and continuity.
Connect workplace, campus, and community protection.
Stalking can enter a health system through clinics, hospitals, parking areas, public events, remote work, academic programs, and employee relationships.
Workplace
OSHA’s workplace violence framework includes harassment, intimidation, and threatening behavior, while healthcare workers may face heightened workplace violence exposure.
An individualized plan may address visitor controls, parking or transportation, badge access, reception scripts, call routing, work location, scheduling, security notification, and public-facing staff information.
Campus and training
Health systems affiliated with colleges or training programs should coordinate with campus safety, student support, human resources, legal counsel, and designated compliance offices as applicable.
Coordination should create a clear handoff, not force the survivor to repeat the experience to multiple departments.
Equitable protection
Safety measures should reduce risk without isolating the survivor, cutting hours, damaging advancement, or making continued employment, education, or care more difficult.
Monitor for retaliation and unintended burden after the plan is activated.
Treat information exposure as an operational risk.
Healthcare operations can unintentionally expose information through appointment reminders, facility directories, shared portals, proxy access, call-center scripts, calendars, staff biographies, and location-enabled applications.
Registration and switchboard teams need a reliable process to apply directory restrictions promptly and avoid confirming a protected person’s presence or location. Review portal proxies, emergency contacts, automatic notifications, release-of-information preferences, audit logs, identity verification, and minimum-necessary access. Serious and imminent threat exceptions are circumstance-specific and should be applied consistently with applicable law and professional judgment.
Do not confirm presence or location when a restriction applies.
Review proxies, recovery channels, notifications, audit logs, and access.
Test call-center scripts, calendars, biographies, reminders, and emergency contacts.
Plan changes from a safer device with trained digital-safety support when possible.
Digital-safety caution: Abrupt password changes, device resets, application removal, or content reporting can alert the person causing harm or erase potential evidence. Do not prescribe one universal technology checklist. When possible, help the survivor consult a trained advocate from a safer device before changing location sharing, account recovery settings, cloud access, device permissions, or public profiles.
Six decisions that strengthen the response.
Clear ownership turns a collection of good intentions into a dependable operating model.
Name accountable leadership
Assign an executive sponsor, operational lead, and after-hours escalation owner.
Create one response pathway
Define how clinical care, advocacy, HR, privacy, security, IT, legal, risk, and campus partners connect.
Protect safe contact
Make communication preferences operational across reminders, portals, mail, and calls.
Separate record types
Clarify what belongs in clinical, workplace, security, and digital-evidence systems and who may access each.
Verify every handoff
Use warm referrals and confirmed ownership so survivors do not navigate departments alone.
Protect against retaliation
Monitor whether safety measures create lost hours, isolation, stalled advancement, or other unintended harm.
Measure whether protection reaches completion.
Track the system from first report through safe follow-up, not simply the number of awareness activities delivered.
Time to trained response
Measure time from report and after-hours availability.Can a person reach informed help without repeating the story?
Time to restrict exposure
Measure directory, portal, contact, and public-information controls.Can operations prevent avoidable disclosure quickly?
Warm handoff completion
Measure referrals with confirmed ownership.Does accountability survive the handoff?
On-time verification
Measure agreed protections completed by deadline.Are plans becoming real protection?
Scenario performance
Measure role-specific training and exercised response.Can each team act correctly under pressure?
Unintended burden
Measure employment, access, schedule, or participation impact.Are measures shifting the burden onto the survivor?
Move from awareness to tested capability.
Use one quarter to establish ownership, equip frontline teams, and test the complete response path.
Map risk and ownership
- Name the executive sponsor, response lead, and after-hours owner.
- Review stalking, workplace violence, privacy, documentation, digital evidence, and nonretaliation policies.
- Test directory restrictions, portal proxies, safe-contact preferences, visitor controls, and public staff-information removal.
- Verify qualified local victim-service referral methods.
Build staff capability
- Train registration, call-center, clinical, security, HR, privacy, IT, and campus teams with role-specific scenarios.
- Adopt a behavior-based response script and confidential consultation route.
- Create an individualized safety workflow with owners, deadlines, and safe follow-up methods.
- Review communications for informed consent and privacy.
Test and improve
- Run a multidisciplinary tabletop exercise across unwanted contact, directory requests, account concerns, and a worksite appearance.
- Measure response times, failed handoffs, privacy-control delays, and unresolved ownership.
- Correct gaps and publish the internal response pathway.
- Schedule quarterly review and confidential feedback.
From awareness to coordinated protection.
National Stalking Awareness Month should change how an organization responds after January ends. Healthcare leaders can recognize the pattern, name the concern without minimizing it, and connect survivor autonomy with privacy, documentation, safety planning, and accountable action.
Awareness becomes meaningful when every report reaches an informed person, every handoff has an owner, and every agreed protection reaches completion.
NAME IT.
STOP IT.
