Someone’s in the kitchen, but there are no banjos involved

By Steve MacArthur, Hospital Safety Consultant

In the never-ending quest for generating new and challenging survey findings, our friends in Chicago have thrown down the gauntlet (or perhaps more aptly, the oven mitt) for a new focus area: the kitchen! Certainly, the kitchen has always been part of the fabric of most regulatory survey visits. If you think about it, kitchens are among the most risk-laden environments in healthcare. You’ve got all the classic physical environment risks—slips, trips, falls, fire, sharps, heat, humidity, chemical hazards, sanitation/cleaning, a lot of entry-level positions—the list goes on and on. You could make the case that the kitchen environment is among the least risk-free environments in any healthcare organization. I will stop short of calling it dangerous, but it sure is hazardous.

To that end, this week’s Joint Commission blog posting outlines some of the major focus areas for the survey process as it relates to the kitchen; the blog also includes a link to a checklist for reducing fire and other risks in the kitchen. If you don’t have a formal process for doing rounds in your kitchen(s), might be work kicking the tires on this one.

Hope you all are well and staying safe. While I think we’re starting to make the adjustments to the “new normal,” the post-Thanksgiving spike (if there is one, and there’s no reason to think there won’t be) should be arriving shortly, so keep up the good work and we’ll get through this!

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 the author of HCPro's Hospital Safety Director's Handbook and is contributing editor for Healthcare Safety Leader. Contact Steve at stevemacsafetyspace@gmail.com.