Déjà vu all over again: A new ligature resistant FAQ!

Using the Hospital FAQ page as the baseline, I reckon we’ve got about a dozen FAQs dealing with ligature resistance with this latest offering. For some reason, the “visual” I get from all of this FAQing is the difference between looking at something from a distance (for example, a celestial body) and seeing that same thing up close and personal. What started out as a sphere of incomprehensibility has become (slowly, ever so slowly, over time) a much more nuanced endeavor—an endeavor that continues to represent survey vulnerabilities for accredited organizations.

One of the interesting things to me is how the narrative has evolved over the last couple of years relative to how hospitals are to deal with all the intricacies of managing ligature risks as a survey vulnerability (which is different than managing the risks to patients, but more on that in a moment). This FAQ reveals some specifics as to what you are required to include in the mitigation strategy for those risks that are not yet removed/resolved/corrected/adjudicated, etc. Now, I don’t know that this is truly ground-breaking stuff, but I think this is cray-cray important because this is what the surveyors are going to be looking for, both in terms of structure, but also as a function of an ongoing process. I’m not going to quote verbatim from the FAQ. I know youse guys are excellent readers and such, so a quick summary:

• Leaders and staff have to know what risks are currently in the mix and somebody has to be responsible for telling them (and documenting that they were told…)
• Identification of patients at risk for suicide/self-harm, with appropriate risk-based interventions
• A process for ongoing assessments and reassessments of organization-defined at-risk behavior
• Staff education re: management of patient risk and implementation of appropriate interventions
• Ensuring this whole program/process is integrated into the organization’s quality assurance/performance improvement (QAPI) program (sounds like it might be a good time to include this as a standing agenda item at your QAPI committee meetings)
• Making sure that any equipment that poses a risk, but is necessary for safe treatment of behavioral health patients (the example given is medical beds with siderails on a geriatric unit), is considered, as a risk, in the patients’ overall suicide/self-harm risk assessments, with appropriate interventions to minimize the identified risks

As I reflect over the seemingly endless amount of survey angst that this topic has wrought over the past couple of years, I keep coming back to the reality that while we can always do better (would we have done as much as quickly without enduring survey bludgeoning?), there is minimal data to support that, while not perfect, hospitals were not doing a good job in managing these at-risk patients. Purely from a risk management perspective, this would be a subject of great interest and concern to any healthcare organization as the burden of managing these patients has shifted over time. I suppose it ultimately gets filed under the “abdication of responsibility” that comes with the disenfranchising of difficult patient demographics and the subsequent “arrival” of those patients in the acute care settings, but it seems to me that (and yes, I recognize that this is part of doing business in healthcare) a little more collaboration during this process (as opposed to pointing fingers and assigning “blame”) might have yielded a better end-product. Hopefully, at some point, we will be given credit for the good work that has been done (and quantified), but I don’t think we are quite there yet.

About the Author: Steve MacArthur is a safety consultant with The Greeley Company in Danvers, Mass. He brings more than 30 years of healthcare management and consulting experience to his work with hospitals, physician offices, and ambulatory care facilities across the country. He is also a contributing editor for Healthcare Safety Leader. Contact Steve at stevemacsafetyspace@gmail.com.