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...
Hospitals must report adverse actions taken against the privileges of a physician or dentist to the National Practitioner Data Bank. Hospitals must report any action affecting a physician’s privileges for more than 30 days.
A systematic review found that preventable medication harm occurs in about 3% of patients across care settings, with more than a quarter of that harm classified as severe or potentially life-threatening.
For many hospital safety and quality leaders, accreditation once followed a predictable arc: a ramp up to survey day, stress during the survey visit, and then a return to normal operations. That approach is becoming increasingly misaligned with how OSHA inspectors, accrediting bodies, and...
As workplace violence continues to rise, hospitals are discovering that some of their most serious security gaps are not rooted in staffing or policy. Instead, they may come down to life safety systems that were designed decades ago.
Whether your healthcare facility is in Las Vegas or Bangor, Maine, extreme weather will always be on the table. From ice, snow, and freezing temperatures to extreme heat and humidity, this weather can put healthcare facilities and their occupants in danger. And it always puts Life Safety Code® (...
When Henry Ford Health gathered teams for its annual Quality Expo and Symposium, recognition was only part of the story. For accreditation and quality leaders, the real test of any award-winning project is whether the work holds up after the posters come down—during daily operations, under...
