News Headlines | | By 2034, there will be a shortage of physicians ranging from 37,800 to 124,000, according to... The top three reasons to continue to require patients, staff, visitors, and vendors to wear masks. After modest uptake for nearly three decades, hospital at home programs are now growing faster... Mac's Safety Space: Continuing our intermittent discussion about returning to normalcy on the facilities operations front, I’ve been reflecting on the monumental amount of facility modifications that have occurred over the last 15-18 months | | |
Healthcare Life Safety Compliance | | As anyone in emergency planning knows, part of being prepared is having an emergency recovery plan, one that lets you also go about the business of caring for patients. The COVID-19 public health emergency won’t last forever. Although it is stretching into its second year, you might be realizing that while your staff must maintain infectious disease protocols as they concentrate care on coronavirus patients, the transition back to normal—whatever that is—will be a challenge. As the public health emergency (PHE) winds down, resist the urge to return to the way you did things before the COVID-19 pandemic, especially in your outlying clinics and ambulatory care sites. Identify the creative solutions to workflow, hand hygiene, and personal protective equipment (PPE) use that worked during the PHE and find ways to improve on them, says Kris Kilgore, RN, BSN, administrative director of Surgical Care of Michigan in Grand Rapids, which specializes in ophthalmologic procedures. | | |
Healthcare Safety Leader | | As the nation continues its recovery from the pandemic, be aware of the continuing changes in regulatory guidance—and how they might impact your health system. For instance, while some 1135 blanket waivers are being rescinded or being overridden by state or local requirements, others remain in place or are still being added. And make sure you differentiate between CDC guidance for the general public and guidance for healthcare organizations. If your healthcare organization has taken advantage of federal 1135 blanket waivers during the national public health emergency (PHE), be sure to review the use of those waivers as you prepare for survey to check if any were inconsistent with requirements under your state emergency or pandemic plan. As the COVID-19 vaccines roll out across the country and around the world, healthcare organizations can now pivot from frontline surge preparation and focus on futureproofing their facilities. While hospitals successfully implemented emergency facility upgrades and stopgap measures to meet pressing pandemic demands, now is the perfect time for healthcare leaders to take a more comprehensive approach to their utility infrastructure capacity and capabilities. No greater lesson can be provided than the freeze that ran through Texas, causing massive power outages and questions about the adequacy of existing infrastructure. These events can come unexpectedly, causing cascading failures, and they really don’t care that we already have our hands full. Here are key challenges and potential solutions that can help health systems prepare for and weather the next crisis. Q: Is there any NFPA regulation stating that a soiled utility room, or any room in which the air flow is monitored on an annual basis, has to be monitored daily? A: No, none that I know of. But a surveyor can ask you the question: How do you know that the air pressure relationships, air changes per hour, and temperature and humidity settings are in their proper ranges? For a soiled utility room that is part of a med-surg unit, this may not be such a significant issue and an annual check may be sufficient. But for a sterile processing clean room or an operating room, the risk factor to the patient is much higher, so those types of rooms will need to be checked more often. | | |
Medical Environment Update | | If you search for top motivational movie speeches, you will see things that might work in real life. The President’s speech from Independence Day (1996), for example, might influence you to never be oppressed by alien tyranny. Freedom will be your rallying cry after listening to William Wallace in Braveheart (1995). Maximus from Gladiator (2000) can speak to your heart about teamwork. Unfortunately, such speeches don’t tend to maintain motivation for great lengths of time. Nor will any of them translate to a motivational discussion about safety with your staff. Safety in the laboratory is not always strictly about bloodborne pathogens, chemical hygiene, and safe work practices. Often it is about the workplace’s physical environment, which can affect many other lab safety categories. Properly maintained temperature and humidity is important for staff comfort, proper equipment function, and quality handling of patient samples. As summer approaches, labs everywhere face similar safety issues that can potentially impact each of these focus areas. | | |
| Product Spotlight | | Your facility is explored from top to bottom for life safety compliance when life safety surveyors arrive on-site. Beat them to the punch with assistance from Analyzing the Hospital Life Safety Survey, Fourth Edition by doing your own in-depth analysis of your organization. Life safety expert and independent consultant Brad Keyes, CHSP, provides a practical, strategic approach to the life safety survey process. He walks you through a room-by-room, floor-by-floor analysis of the life safety measures you must have in place to avoid costly citations. The book simplifies Joint Commission standards and CMS requirements and focuses on ways to pass your next life safety survey. 
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Hospital Safety Newsletters | | Sign up for our monthly newsletters, and get an article each week! Healthcare Life Safety Compliance This award-winning monthly resource simplifies confusing code references so you can better protect your facility. You need Healthcare Life Safety Compliance to keep you up to date on the latest changes to the Life Safety Code (LSC), as well as The Joint Commissions Life Safety standards, NFPA codes, and related fire protection provisions to ensure the safety of patients, visitors, and employees. Hospital Safety Leader With a Hospital Safety Center membership, you?ll gain complete access to HSL, a16-page monthly publication that provides safety professionals with crucial information and clear-cut guidance on how to improve and ensure hospital safety. Medical Environment Update Keeping safety professionals up to speed with the always-changing policies of OSHA, CDC, EPA, and other healthcare regulatory agencies. Discover workplace health and safety tips written with facilities like yours in mind. | | |
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