A new study detailed the alarming increase in hospital-based shootings over the last 25 years, with more than twice as many events reported in the last 10 years than the decade prior.
Improving safety in inpatient care depends less on adding new policies and more on strengthening execution around accountability, communication, and follow-up. Systems must be designed to make the right actions clear and unavoidable.
In this guest column, Dan Scungio, MT(ASCP), SLS, laboratory safety officer for multihospital system Sentara Healthcare in Virginia, and otherwise known as “Dan, the Lab Safety Man,” discusses the important issues that affect your job every day. Today, he talks about the dangers of aerosol...
In 2026, hospital accreditation is no longer about perfecting choreography before survey week. It's about building systems so resilient that compliance becomes invisible.
The biggest breakdown in hospital security is the inability to prove policies actually guide decisions in real time. For healthcare safety and security leaders, that gap shows up in critical moments.
Despite being a high-income country, the United States has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world. The CDC states that over 80% of pregnancy-related deaths are preventable—a clear indicator that reform is needed.
Accreditors look for functioning safety systems, naturally. However, hospitals shouldn’t only be looking at their safety systems in terms of passing a survey.
Hospital labs don’t typically discover OSHA compliance gaps during routine operations. They often find them when an auditor is already on-site, and by then, it’s too late to fix what’s been quietly slipping.
UV-C technology utilizes ultraviolet-C radiation, the most effective type of UV light for killing germs. Application of UV-C is not limited to surfaces; it can also be used to disinfect air and liquids. However, there are some drawbacks.
Hospitals invest heavily in accreditation readiness, communi-cation protocols, and patient safety systems. But when a case moves into litigation, those same systems are examined through a different lens—not as policy, but as proof.
