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...
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.
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.
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...
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.
Literacy rates in the United States are dropping—not just among school-aged children, but in adults as well. According to the National Literacy Institute, 54% of adults in the U.S. have a literacy level below that of a sixth-grader. Literacy impacts many aspects of life, and healthcare is no...
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® (...
Laboratory compliance programs have never suffered from a lack of policies. Instead, what they often struggle with is consistency—particularly during busy handoffs, staffing shortages, and routine operational pressure. As regulatory expectations tighten and inspections increasingly focus on how...
