At the urging of CMS, The Joint Commission has been providing surveyors with extra training on procedures related to investigating possible immediate jeopardy situations, as well as the use of open-ended questions during interviews with hospital staff.
Sterile processing departments have and will continue to receive a lot of scrutiny during surveys. That is also where hospitals can see a lot of high-risk deficiencies or even a ruling of immediate threat to health or safety.
Which would you rather do? Tell someone in the C-suite the hospital is facing a CMS immediate jeopardy ruling because the staff was so overwhelmed by paper drug prescriptions after a ransomware attack shut down computer records that a 3-year-old patient was given five times the prescribed dosage...
Ahead of winter, ensure you have the proper equipment for snow removal, especially if your facility is in an area of the country that sees a lot of the white stuff.
Check with the hospital pharmacists and program managers overseeing implementation of the latest updates to the U.S. Pharmacopeia (USP) standards on what cleaning solutions they need and maintenance concerns they have before the updated USP requirements for non-sterile and sterile drug...
Get your respiratory protection program up to date and make sure it’s written and enforced, because OSHA inspectors are pressing to put those violations in a category that could mean a penalty of up to $156,259 per violation.