A fire can double in size every 30 seconds, and in a laboratory crammed full of people, chemicals, biological materials, and expensive equipment, that exponential growth can quickly lead to disastrous results. The people in your lab need to know what to do if a fire breaks out just as much as...
You have to know where you shut them off—make sure you label those shutoff valves!
That’s one of the pearls of wisdom dispensed during the most recent Executive Briefings by our friends in Chicago. It appears that there’s been a run on unlabeled shutoff valves during this year’s surveys,...
Artificial intelligence is increasingly impacting healthcare safety and compliance, offering tools for improving patient care and operational efficiency. Troy Lair, PhD, principal consultant of Elite Accreditation Consultants, caught up with Medical Environment Update for a Q&A on how AI is...
When the Stress, Trauma, and Resilience (STAR) program at Ohio State’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health set out to find the best ways and timing to reach out to those who have experienced a traumatic event, it discovered that victims weren’t the only ones in need of support....
In May, the Accreditation Commission for Health Care (ACHC) introduced its revised Long-Term Care Dialysis (LTCD) Certification, offering a new level of recognition for providers delivering dialysis services in long-term care and skilled nursing facilities. This certification is available to all...
In this Q&A, Darren Osleger, a consultant for Jensen Hughes with expertise in the surgical world, shares his insights on fire safety in hospital environments. Osleger discusses the importance of comprehensive fire risk assessments, effective communication among surgical...
One of my favorite comic book story arcs is a miniseries called The Watchmen. In the story, the superheroes get a bit out of control and a common phrase emerges from the people: “Who watches the Watchmen?” The idea makes me think about how safety issues in labs can sometimes occur...
I apologize for not pushing this out a few weeks earlier than now—I’m writing this a few days after Daylight Savings Time, so my brain is wonky and erasing my thoughts like an Etch A Sketch (you all know about that, yes? If not, this will...
This is part two of our interview with Kurt Patton, MS, RPH, founder of Patton Healthcare Consulting and a former director of accreditation services for The Joint Commission (TJC), on conducting mock or preparatory surveys.
When there isn’t an immediate consequence to an unsafe behavior, in the laboratory or elsewhere, people can easily mistake “nothing bad happened” with “nothing bad will ever happen.” This leads to normalized deviance, where laboratory safety policies and standard operating procedures (SOP) are...
