All Entries in the "Life Safety Code" Category

Even splintered, life safety standards top the citation list so far in 2009

When The Joint Commission announced a while back that the old EC.5.20 was the top cited standard in hospitals in 2008, there some observers (including me) who thought that statistic would be hard to repeat. After all, it was reasoned, the all-encompassing EC.5.20 had splintered into various new life safety standards in 2009, none of which would carry the punch of their predecessor.

Well, we non-believers were wrong. Information just released by Joint Commission Resources yesterday shows that for the first half of 2009, two life safety standards and an environment of care standard – all of them related to fire protection requirements – comprised three of the top five most cited standards in hospitals. [more]

Be wary about using fire drills as emergency management tests

I was recently asked whether fire drills could count towards The Joint Commission’s requirements for emergency management tests under EM.03.01.03.

I suppose if you evaluated a fire drill to the extent called for under [more]

New development: CMS now allows six-year damper testing in hospitals

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) issued a memo to its state survey agencies that now formally allows hospitals to use six-year testing frequencies for fire and smoke dampers.

What’s that mean for hospitals? [more]

How leadership interacts with egress corridor storage

In my experience, I’m not sure that I could tie leadership directly to the problem of wheeled items parked in egress corridors.

However, it would certainly not be a stretch for a citation under [more]

Exit signs in mechanical rooms? It depends …

I was asked recently whether exit signs are required in mechanical rooms, as a hospital had received a citation from a Joint Commission surveyor concerning this matter.

There is no specific requirement in the Life Safety Code for mechanical spaces to have exit signs. Moving on to The Joint Commission’s standards, [more]

A deadly surgical fire results in CMS scrutiny

The case of Heartland Regional Medical Center in Marion, IL, shows just how important surgical fire prevention is for a hospital in terms of bad publicity and Medicare reimbursement.

As noted in my HealthLeaders Media story last month, on September 2 a flash fire occurred on a patient undergoing surgery at Heartland Regional. That patient later died of her injuries.

I just read earlier today [more]

Here’s a way to increase life safety awareness among nurses

Brad Keyes

One of my favorite sessions at last week’s Life Safety Code Solutions for Hospitals seminar was a discussion about how to better engage nurses about life safety requirements.

The key, said Brad Keyes, safety consultant for The Greeley Company, is to bring the Life Safety Code into the realm of patient safety.

And that means, for example, not ordering nurses to take a blood pressure cuff machine out of the corridor because it encroaches on minimum clear widths under the Life Safety Code. Nurses won’t relate to rules like that.

Instead, a better approach would be [more]

Extra fire drill as part of The Joint Commission’s ILSMs

I fielded a question a little while back about using a fire drill as an interim life safety measure (ILSM) under Joint Commission standard LS.01.02.01 EP 11.

The actual verbiage from the pre-2009 standard was that each organization would conduct [more]

ASHE may have “had it up to here” with CMS when it comes to damper testing

You can really sense the frustration that ASHE — and more precisely, that of Deputy Executive Director Doug Erickson — has with CMS these days. Just read the latest ASHE bulletin to its members about six-year damper testing and you’ll feel the bad vibes. [more]

Alarm transmission options are tight when it comes to fire drill requirements

There was discussion swirling this week on HCPro’s Patient Safety Talk group about whether folks are required to actually pull the fire alarm during a fire drill.

Unfortunately this is not quite as clear-cut as one would want, though perhaps [more]