Suicides were the third most common sentinel event of 2015, with 95 reported cases in 2015's Sentinel Event Statistics. The total number of patient suicides reported to The Joint Commission is now up to 1,184 since the start of the decade.
Over the last decade, suicide rates in the United States have been creeping steadily skyward. In some states, the suicide rate is nearly twice the national average.
A recent report from a federal watchdog agency offers new insight into the barriers hospitals still face when it comes to addressing patient safety concerns, offering a concise distillation of the key gaps that remain in ongoing efforts to prevent patient harm.
Briefings on Accreditation & Quality - Volume 27, Issue 5
The Joint Commission released its 2015 Sentinel Event Statistics in March; based on 936 reported events, the accreditor found the most common sentinel events were unintended retention of a foreign body (116), wrong-site/wrong-side/wrong-procedure surgery (111), falls resulting...
CMS recently clarified policy on acceptable control materials for lab testing. While not changing any of the standards, the agency explained some of the key points to §493.1256(c) of the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA) Interpretive Guidelines (IG).
The Joint Commission last week published a press release and an eight minute video defending its pain management standards after critics claimed they are fueling the opioid epidemic.
Since there aren’t any standards for determining the accuracy and timeliness of quality data, how do we know if today's quality measures are accurate? According to an opinion piece published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, the answer is simple. We can't.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is attempting to develop better methods of measuring and reporting data on catheter-associated urinary tract infections (CAUTIs) and central line-associated bloodstream infections (CLABSI) rates.
This month, CMS plans to add a new “five-star” hospital rating system to its Hospital Compare website. The plan has come under fire, however, with many saying the rating system is too simplified to show true quality and puts too much emphasis on patient satisfaction.
More than 60 medical experts and nonprofit organizations signed petitions last week, asking The Joint Commission and CMS for changes in their respective pain management policies. The two petitions, spearheaded by Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing (PROP), claim that making physicians...
