All Entries in the "Joint Commission" Category
After the Fort Hood shootings, Twitter proves useful for one hospital
For many people, social media sites like Twitter and Facebook are frequently used to quote movie lines or discuss whether they had coffee or hair of the dog with their Corn Flakes. But from a professional standpoint, The Joint Commission is encouraging the use of social sites for emergency management purposes.
Thursday’s shootings at Fort Hood, TX, let one facility rev up its Twitter presence with useful updates and information. [more]
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]
Joint Commission offers guidance, but no mandates, for patient-owned items
Many of you deal with patient-owned equipment, such as hair dryers, coming into the hospital.
The Joint Commission published an FAQ on this topic last year, and this is one of those instances in which, in opening the risk assessment door, the FAQ provides just enough semi-specific information to confuse matters. [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]
Former Joint Commission VP among those appearing at our one-day emergency management conference
Joseph Cappiello
Get help analyzing your hospital’s disaster plans while also bolstering your professional development during HCPro’s Emergency Management Coordinator’s Workshop, which takes place October 26 in Atlanta.
Our experts for the program include:
- Joseph Cappiello, chair of Cappiello & Associates in Elmhurst, IL, and former vice president for accreditation field operations at The Joint Commission
- James Kendig, vice president of safety and security for Health First, Inc., based in Rockledge, FL
- Mary Russell, senior hospital project manager at the Florida Department of Health’s Office of Public Health Preparedness
Click here to read our speakers’ full bios and our show’s agenda.
No hard-and-fast rule to discuss patient safety at EC committee meetings
There is no Joint Commission mandate for patient-safety-related concerns to be managed through the environment of care or safety committee.
Some of the former EC standards (or more properly, EPs) that were removed with the 2009 changeover did imply [more]
Sinks, ice machines, and a little infection control
A little while back, I was asked about an under-the-sink area that was dirty with chipped Formica along the bottom of the sink cabinet. The same organization had dripping ice machines that were rusty.
As it turns out, there is a dual applicability to these problems, as they can be curtailed [more]
