| While bills to combat workplace violence in healthcare have been filed and died in Congress before, the latest bill has passed the House and was referred to the Senate in April. It calls for OSHA to implement a workplace violence prevention standard, which the agency is already working on. In a recent edition of The Joint Commission (TJC)’s Perspectives magazine, the healthcare accreditor clarified that eyewash stations don’t have to be inspected weekly for its EC.02.02.01, EP 5 standard. It also clarified that eyewash stations are not needed for storage areas where chemicals are being stored, provided the chemicals aren’t being mixed or used in that space. Furthermore, eyewash stations are not needed for chemicals classified as irritants on their safety data sheet (SDS). And finally, the clarification said that “strict compliance with ANSI eyewash standard Z358.1 is not required.” In case your emergency preparedness folks were wondering, as long as you have activated your emergency plan or are still under it because of the continuing public health emergency (PHE), you get a pass again this year on the full-scale community-based preparedness exercise required by CMS. Q: During construction/renovation projects in the hospital, infection prevention barriers are frequently built. We use our ILSM procedures to assess the risk of these barriers. The problem I am having relates to sprinkler coverage within the containment area. Often, the containment may extend along a wall in the corridor or an anteroom will be built in the corridor. My concern is that the anteroom or containment area in the corridor will not have sprinkler coverage because of the barrier placement. The sprinklers are outside the containment barrier. What can be done to mitigate the risk in these temporarily unsprinklered parts of our fully sprinkled hospital? I have tried going through NFPA 13 but cannot find anything that refers to these temporary situations. Do we institute a fire watch in those unsprinklered areas? One of our project managers feels we do not need to do a fire watch if we place an extra fire extinguisher in the unsprinklered containment area or anteroom. | 