Hospitals are getting hit from two sides right now: The accreditation manuals are evolving, while surveyors keep drilling into the same operational pressure points that create real patient risk—transitions, medications, documentation, and the environment of care.
Emergency response time is rarely treated as a core safety metric in hospitals, yet it often determines how incidents actually unfold. While compliance programs and traditional reporting focus on outcomes after the fact, lost minutes during staff safety events, isolated emergencies, and even...
A recent report highlights the top patient safety challenges impacting the healthcare industry in 2026, revealing how vulnerabilities in technology, staffing, culture, and public health intersect to expand patient risk.
Healthcare-acquired infections (HAI) remain a major threat to patient safety despite the best efforts of healthcare workers everywhere. Carmen Duke, MPH, CIC, an infection prevention contractor in the Greater Chattanooga area, discusses what leads to HAIs and some of the most...
Laboratories are a unique environment from an OSHA training standpoint. They include complex chemical and biological materials, potentially harmful equipment, and large numbers of staff.
Traditionally, residency is seen as a gauntlet through which physicians in training must pass to become competent, independent practitioners. Long hours, sleep deprivation, taxing and emotional patient care, constant supervision, and the transformation of theoretical knowledge into practice...
Fire detection in healthcare is rarely about whether a hospital has a system in place. It’s about whether that system supports real-world decision-making under pressure—for staff who cannot evacuate patients quickly and for first responders entering complex, occupied buildings with incomplete...
First discovered in the 1970s, Legionella bacterium is responsible for legionellosis: a respiratory disease that can cause a type of pneumonia called legionnaires’ disease, which kills about a quarter of the people who contract it.
For hospital accreditation and quality leaders, patient safety and quality improvement are often described as inseparable. In reality, they frequently operate as parallel functions—adjacent on paper but disconnected in execution.
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 ventilation in...
