The Joint Commission releases its 2020 sentinel event report: patient falls, unintentional retention of foreign objects, suicides, delays in treatment, and wrong surgery are once again the top patient safety problems.
The number of sentinel events reviewed by The Joint Commission (TJC) in the first half of this pandemic-dominated year are well under the pace for last year. But that’s probably not unexpected given the lockdown of the nation’s hospitals as they focused on preparing for the 2019 coronavirus...
Healthcare compliance changed quite a bit in the last decade. For one thing, fire safety moved into the current millennium with the adoption of the 2012 versions of NFPA 101 Life Safety Code® (LSC) and NFPA 99 Health Care Facilities Code®.
While suicide overall often has been in the top sentinel events, this breakdown includes two categories that split suicide events into those involving an inpatient and events involving a patient within 72 hours of discharge.
With suicide rates high and getting higher, hospitals and clinics need to revamp how they work with suicidal patients. The first step is developing a system to identify struggling patients so they can get the care they need.
In 2014, the Parkland Health and Hospital System (PHHS) in...
A look at the Automated All Cause Harm trigger system
The prevention of avoidable harms has been a goal of healthcare since day one, but it was given fresh life in 2010 when the Office of Inspector General (OIG) urged that healthcare facilities report...
At the end of March, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced its third global safety initiative, the Global Patient Safety Challenge on Medication Safety, which calls on facilities to cut the rate of medication-related errors in half by 2022. The organization hopes to do this by:
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Briefings on Accreditation & Quality - Volume 28, Issue 5
The Joint Commission in March unveiled Sentinel Event Alert (SEA) 57, which stresses the role of leadership in developing and sustaining a culture of safety. It goes on to claim that leadership’s failure in this regard contributes to several adverse events, including wrong site surgery and...
Briefings on Accreditation & Quality - Volume 27, Issue 9
The Joint Commission released its sentinel event statistics for the first half of 2016 in the August edition of Perspectives. The report relies on self-reported data and only shows a small portion of the never events that occur each year. The report, based on 349 reported events...
Briefings on Accreditation & Quality - Volume 27, Issue 4
How do you help patients who want to harm themselves?
The Joint Commission addressed this question in February with Sentinel Event Alert 56, which focuses on finding the root causes of patient suicides and how to prevent them. Between 2010 and 2014, The Joint...
