By this point, many facilities in the U.S. will have faced their share of snowstorms, most of which they’ve probably handled adeptly. But are you ready for a truly bad snowstorm? The kind that can leave a region crippled for days, or even weeks at a time?
Briefings on Accreditation & Quality - Volume 30, Issue 2
Make sure your staff knows and implements your policy on continuous observation of suicidal patients, check and recheck that air pressures are appropriate to the room, update infection control procedures to the latest recommendations, and be prepared for surprise surveys.
Briefings on Accreditation & Quality - Volume 30, Issue 2
The Joint Commission (TJC) announced revisions to its suicide prevention National Patient Safety Goal on November 27. NPSG 15.01.01 now has seven elements of performance (EP), up from three and will take effect July 1, 2019.
Consult your emergency management plan when facing an impending storm, and update this plan with lessons learned after each storm to avoid grappling with problems that may already have solutions. This is just one of the lessons reinforced for hospitals that were impacted by Winter Storm Jonas (...
Tell your nurses that soon that packaging for a patient’s nicotine patch, gum, or lozenge might go straight into the regular trash — as long as it is FDA-approved as an over-the-counter nicotine replacement therapy.
And your state must sign off on the exemption of the packaging as...
Last November, the innocently named Camp Fire killed over 80 people in California, making it the deadliest wildfire in the state’s history. The fire destroyed 10,500 homes, filled the air with smoke for miles around, and burned an area the size of Chicago. The fire was just one of 6,228 that...
You can modify the Triage by Resource Allocation for IN-patient (TRAIN) matrix to suit your facility’s needs in case of a mass evacuation. Hospitals across California and other areas, including the Sharp HealthCare system in San Diego, have modified the matrix for use as part of their all-...
Briefings on Accreditation & Quality - Volume 30, Issue 2
It’s not news to most providers that suicide and drug abuse are on the rise. However, a trio of reports from the CDC have shed light on the extent of the problem.
In 2017, American life expectancy dropped for the third year in a row, with the main culprits of the decline being drug...
