The more I look at the announced changes to Joint Commission’s accreditation product(s), the more it seems to me that the end result is more a reshuffling of the same deck of cards we’ve been playing with since the dawn of the life safety surveyor as part of the accreditation survey team.
As hospitals and health systems prepare for the 2026 update to The Joint Commission (TJC)’s accreditation standards, one of the most significant changes on the horizon is the proposed merger of the Life Safety (LS) and Environment of Care (EC) chapters into a single, comprehensive Physical...
Building trust with your lab team to the point where you can leave them alone to do their jobs safely is essential, says Jason P. Nagy, PhD, MLS(ASCP), QLS, and Dan Scungio, MT(ASCP), SLS. Nagy is a laboratory safety support coordinator and Scungio is a...
Sometimes when I'm preparing a new post, I like to do a quick search to see if I'd covered the subject previously and, if so, how long ago it might have been. I recently did a search relative to the Safety Space and the hierarchy of hazard controls and found that we had touched on the subject a...
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 the importance of...
In this Q&A, Meier explores how hospitals are evolving their emergency plans to respond to increasing climate-related disasters, cybersecurity threats, and staffing shortages.
Burnout. Communication breakdowns. Security blind spots. These are daily realities in hospitals, and they can be the difference between a safe patient encounter and a sentinel event.
We know what works best in our house; as long as we can "frame" that work as a function of compliance, then that should be enough to pass muster during survey—don't you think?
When talking about culture in healthcare, two terms that come up often are “safety culture” and “just culture.” A laboratory safety professional will likely be familiar with the former, but what is the latter?
