Fire safety may often operate behind the scenes, but in healthcare facilities, it still needs to be front of mind. That’s a core message from Dale Lyman, CFPS, senior fire protection consultant with Telgian Engineering & Consulting and author of the Ambulatory Surgery...
There is a lot for an employee to learn when they start at a new laboratory. During their onboarding, they will learn the standard operating procedures for cleaning, using, and servicing lab equipment. They will learn about the proper handling and disposal of hazardous materials and waste. They...
The March edition of The Joint Commission’s Perspectives announced that as of March 30, 2025, accreditation surveys for hospices would include a Life Safety Code® (LSC) surveyor. This comes as part of a group of new and revised...
While the healthcare environment is very much its own "thing," there are certain universal risks that can come into play in any workplace (some more than others, but it's important to embrace the universal). These fundamental risks include:
I’ve been ruminating a bit about how AI is going to impact safety operations. I think there’s probably going to be some kind of benefit, maybe managing deficiencies more efficiently.
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...
In March, the American Hospital Association (AHA) published a new Insight Report: Improvement in Safety Culture Linked to Better Patient and Safety Outcomes, which shows improvements to key patient and workforce experiences. These developments indicate better work among team members in...
Fires don’t happen every day in healthcare, but that doesn’t mean they never happen. In the March edition of The Joint Commission’s (TJC) Environment of Care News, the commission discussed some clinical fires that happened in 2024—one caused by a high-flow oxygen humidifier, and another...
This is Part 2 of our interview on Imagine Pediatrics, a 24/7 virtual and in-home medical group serving children on Medicaid in Texas, Florida, and the District of Columbia, with Courtney Bolton, PhD, its chief behavioral health officer.
Plan, do, check, and act. When a problem emerges in the laboratory, it’s not enough to just respond and move on. You also need to find out what caused it and how to prevent it from happening again. Without closing the loop, the safety problem will linger in your lab until it’s noticed by...
