With skies literally turning red from wildfire smoke on the West Coast, we have unlocked a couple of our Patient Safety Monitor Journal articles on wildfires, mass evacuation planning, and patient triage. The second article includes a link to a triage toolkit that can be modified to fit any hospital facility. Please stay safe, we hope this helps a little.

With the goal of eliminating preventable medical harm, a new National Action Plan was released today by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s (IHI) National Steering Committee for Patient Safety (NSC).

In addition to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the United States and the world continues to be challenged by disasters, such as droughts, earthquakes, fires, floods, severe weather events, and terrorism. When they occur, nurses are called on to respond during and following a disaster.

In the September issue, we told you about a hospital that responded quickly to threats posed after the nation learned of the 2019 novel coronavirus, but still faced a finding of immediate jeopardy (IJ) to patients and staff from CMS officials.

Such findings can not only threaten a hospital’s ability to bill Medicare, but also involve key resources to write and implement a Plan of Correction (POC) sufficient to satisfy CMS surveyors and remove the IJ.

We asked Gayle Nash, RN, MPH, CEO of Nash Healthcare Consulting, to review the CMS report and offer her input on the deficiencies and a plan of correction.

The CMS Form-2567 “Statement of Deficiencies” was among those posted recently by CMS on its online database of hospitals surveyed within the last few months that were cited for “substantial deficiencies.” Find the Quality, Certification and Oversight Reports (QCOR) group database at https://qcor.cms.gov/hosp_cop/HospitalCOPs.html.

The percentage of older adults who had ever participated in a telehealth visit rose from 4% in May 2019 to 30% in June 2020, according to the University of Michigan National Poll on Healthy Aging.

However, the poll also found that these patients still considered in-office visits more effective, and many of them had no choice but to see their doctor via telehealth.