This is part two of our interview with Kurt Patton, MS, RPH, founder of Patton Healthcare Consulting and a former director of accreditation services for The Joint Commission (TJC), on conducting mock or preparatory surveys.
When there isn’t an immediate consequence to an unsafe behavior, in the laboratory or elsewhere, people can easily mistake “nothing bad happened” with “nothing bad will ever happen.” This leads to normalized deviance, where laboratory safety policies and standard operating procedures (SOP) are...
I will admit that I’ve been sitting on this one for a couple of months as I have no interest in sensationalizing any acts of violence, even inadvertently. But it also seems like not too much time passes before firearm violence (yet again) makes front page news, so I guess this topic may be more...
Workplace violence in healthcare is an escalating concern, as highlighted by recent reports and studies that expose the alarming trends affecting healthcare workers across the United States.
Often when we think about safety in the laboratory, we think about the immediate: disposing of the sharp in our hand right away or getting someone who had chemicals splash in their eyes to the eyewash station right now. But being proactive about safety requires the lab worker and safety officer...
This is Part 2 of our interview with Patricia McGaffigan, RN, MS, CPPS, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI)’s senior advisor and president of the Certification Board of Professionals in Patient Safety. PSMJ spoke with McGaffigan about the Certified...
I’ve had an interesting couple of weeks scrambling up and down ladders while engaged in a focused above-the-ceiling life safety compliance assessment. The experience gave me time to think about one of the basic tenets (at least, for me) of managing the physical environment, which I will...
The Institute for Healthcare Improvement recently announced that 7,000 healthcare professionals around the world have earned the organization’s Certified Professional in Patient Safety (CPPS) credential. PSMJ sat down with Patricia McGaffigan of IHI to ask her about the...
This week brings us something of a mixed bag, but I think the two articles speak to the heart of how our management of the healthcare physical environment informs everything that goes on around and in it. I have consistently maintained (small pun intended) that pretty much everything in...
Conducting mock surveys, also called preparatory surveys, is a great way to ready your staff and find problems before the real thing comes to your facility. But how do you run an effective preparatory survey—one that mimics the real deal with the time and resources your healthcare organization...
