CMS issues EMTALA warning to hospitals, while TJC reiterates surveys may be impacted by continuing public health emergency.

Check your emergency rooms, outpatient clinics and anywhere else where pandemic-related equipment shortages have forced your facility to go outside normal supply lines for replacement medical devices. You could be saving yourself an immediate threat to health and safety (ITHS) citing by The Joint Commission (TJC).

The coronavirus pandemic has highlighted workforce shortages at health systems and hospitals across the country. On Sept. 1, the American Nurses Association urged the federal Department of Health & Human Services to declare a nurse staffing crisis and to take immediate steps to implement solutions. Last week, Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health announced that the Lebanon, New Hampshire-based health system had raised its minimum rate of pay for all positions from $14 per hour to $17 per hour to address workforce shortages.

Clinical laboratories surveyed under HFAP standards in 2020 showed improvements over the top deficiencies identified in earlier years, in a time when “clinical laboratories in all settings managed high testing volumes, demand for rapid turnaround times, and supply chain constraints related to the pandemic,” according to the accrediting organization’s (AO) 2021 HFAP Quality Review report.

Even so, labs were cited for not following ANSI standards for eyewash stations, not following manufacturer’s instructions for waived testing, and not performing equipment maintenance checks—or at least not documenting the maintenance.

If COVID-19 cases are rising in your area again and you’re seeking a fresh look at your pandemic response plan, download the free patient surge preparedness checklist by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI).

IHI also has just released a set of recommendations titled “ ‘Psychological PPE:’ Promote Health Care Workforce Mental Health and Well-Being.” (For more, see sidebar.)

IHI’s “Hospital Preparedness for a COVID-19 Surge: Assessment Tool” offers a nine-page checklist of evidence-based items it has boiled down from resources and lessons learned from organizations such as CMS, the CDC, the American Hospital Association, the American Society for Health Care Engineering, Doctors Without Borders, and the New York state and Massachusetts departments of health, as well as a variety of hospitals and health systems from Boston to Texas.