This is Part 2 of our interview with Scott Wytosick, CFPS, CFI-II, fire and life safety consultant at Jensen Hughes, and former life safety coordinator at Akron Children’s Hospital, on wayfinding and signage in healthcare.
Preparing your hospital for an accreditation survey is stressful, year-round work. Because survey schedules are unannounced, accreditation professionals must always be ready for CMS, The Joint Commission, or other accrediting organizations to show up at their door.
Finding and eliminating infection control (IC) violations is one of the most crucial parts of healthcare, regardless of what organization or department you’re working in. This includes laboratories, where staff are constantly working with things that no one wants spread through the rest of the...
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 lab safety practices.
All too often, healthcare organizations are left to figure out compliance on their own. Certainly, some folks have the wherewithal to contract with vendors to provide assistance, which is great, but sometimes it's the back stories that result in compliance that are most useful/compelling. With...
One of the most feared laboratory safety risks is exposure to hazardous materials, be they biological, chemical, or radioactive. Preventing and responding to these events are key to every laboratory safety officer’s job, and knowing what to do can sometimes be the difference between life and...
Kurt Patton, MS, RPh, founder and president emeritus of Patton Healthcare Consulting, knows intimately about some of the misunderstood compliance challenges in hospitals today. He catches up with IAQ to talk about some of them in this first part.
Despite being a high-income country, the United States has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The CDC states that over 80% of pregnancy-related deaths are preventable—a clear indicator that reform is...
We live in a world full of polls and trends and all manners of things that represent themselves as manifestations of "how things are going." When I was coming up through the ranks, the closest thing I ever received to management training was a sense of the approach known as "management by...
Safety training shouldn’t be something that is performed once and put aside. Yet in far too many laboratories, that’s exactly what happens. Do you have a new employee? Train them. Have they been on staff for a few years? Maybe you should do a yearly fire drill and that’s it. However, just like...
