With temperatures dropping and snow on the way in many states, hospitals and clinics need to create a checklist of winter safety items. We asked Brad Keyes, CHSP, owner of Keyes Life Safety Compliance, about things that should be on that checklist from a life safety standpoint.
Last fall, as CMS and accrediting organizations increased their scrutiny of how hospitals address suicide risk, the question of whether security or police officers could be...
Assess your environmental cleaning protocols, ensure staff are trained properly, and verify the effectiveness of both as CMS increases scrutiny of infection prevention and control during the coronavirus pandemic.
Earlier this year CMS cited hospitals for not following their own policies...
Because of the coronavirus pandemic, face masks have become ubiquitous (though occasionally controversial) in 2020—from N95 respirators to homemade masks made from bandanas and t-shirts. During the height of the ...
Just because I am fascinated by all sorts of stuff (and I suspect that, since you’re still with me on this, you might be interested in all sorts of stuff...
With over 100 fires destroying entire towns and displacing hundreds of thousands of people, 2020 was one of the worst wildfire seasons on record for the West Coast (see ...
Surveys are resuming in areas deemed safe for on-site visits even as the coronavirus pandemic continues its waves of surge and decline. With COVID-19 still on everyone’s mind, expect to be asked for documentation of inspection, testing, and maintenance (ITM) of critical systems and to show...
Be prepared to explain to surveyors how you will catch up with any inspection, testing, and maintenance (ITM) of non-critical systems that had been delayed because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Update logs and records for any ITM done on critical systems, and make sure you can show that...
It’s not easy being an accrediting organization (AO) these days. DNV GL Healthcare has been in the business of deeming U.S. acute care and critical access hospitals for approval to bill Medicare for more than a decade.
But when the AO, whose parent company is in Norway, wanted to branch...
U.S. coronavirus deaths are likely understated, and the United States has relatively high COVID-19 mortality compared to 18 similar countries, a pair of recent studies published by the Journal of the American Medical Association shows. The United States has led the world in reported...
