Regulations and safety standards help reduce medical errors, safeguard public health, and maintain operational accreditation and licensure. However, they are only the minimum requirements and do not guarantee safety.
Regulatory investigations, civil litigation, criminal enforcement actions, and reputational damage can all follow when hospitals fail to detect, document, and respond appropriately to controlled substance loss or misuse.
In this guest column, Dan Scungio, MT(ASCP), SLS, laboratory safety officer for multihospital system Sentara Healthcare in Virginia, and otherwise known as “Dan, the Lab Safety Man,” discusses the important issues that affect your job every day. Today, he talks...
The presence of lifts, slings, transfer benches, walkers, and mobility aids means little if hospitals cannot prove those de-vices are inspected, maintained, tested, and tied to document-ed staff training.
The July 2026 issue of Medical Environment Update will be the last one as we sunset this publication to create an offer that focuses on accreditation and patient safety issues that affect your entire care delivery process.
Because specimen transport involves personnel coordination, handoffs, and environmental conditions, there are many possible points of failure during the process—all of which can create significant consequences.
In this guest column, Dan Scungio, MT(ASCP), SLS, laboratory safety officer for multihospital system Sentara Healthcare in Virginia, and otherwise known as “Dan, the Lab Safety Man,” discusses the important issues that affect your job every day. Today, he talks about the dangers of aerosol...
Hospital labs don’t typically discover OSHA compliance gaps during routine operations. They often find them when an auditor is already on-site, and by then, it’s too late to fix what’s been quietly slipping.
Clinical laboratories require a tremendous amount of energy to function. From continuous ventilation to temperature-controlled storage, water consumption, and high volumes of waste, routine laboratory operations carry a significant environmental footprint.
In this guest column, Dan Scungio, MT(ASCP), SLS, laboratory safety officer for multihospital system Sentara Healthcare in Virginia, and otherwise known as “Dan, the Lab Safety Man,” discusses the important issues that affect your job every day. Today, he talks about national lab safety trends...
