More news from CMS and HHS on hospital surveys and COVID-19

HHS says it will give states 60 days’ notice before it officially ends the COVID-19 public health emergency.

CMS tells AOs they can put surveys on hold, if necessary. But not all AOs may change current schedules.

One Iowa nurse quoted in the publication explained in stark terms how the continuing onslaught of COVID-19 is pushing nurses and other frontline healthcare workers beyond physical exhaustion and inflicting emotional damage on those who care for patients.

The last few months of managing a pandemic have exhausted you. But you still need to prepare for that upcoming survey, whenever it happens, whether it’s a virtual review or an on-site visit.

Start by taking a look back at your last survey report as well as last year’s environment of care committee reports to remind you what you’ve already done and especially what you might still need to resolve within the Environment of Care (EC), Life Safety (LS), and Emergency Management (EM) standards.

“The mantra over the last couple of months has been: The focus of the survey is not on what’s going well, but rather on what’s not going well,” says Steven A. MacArthur, a senior consultant with The Greeley Company in Danvers, Massachusetts.

CMS announced in 2019 that, in an attempt to address complaints that hospital surveys to validate findings by accreditation organizations (AO) were done too long after the fact and that facilities were faced with double survey duty, it would test a program to conduct its work at the same time AOs were on-site.

While some side-by-side reviews of AOs were conducted, validation surveys in general were put on hold in 2020 along with many survey activities as the nation’s hospitals grappled with the COVID-19 pandemic.

But in its latest report to Congress about its oversight of AOs enforcing Conditions of Participation (CoP) and Conditions for Coverage (CfC), CMS indicated that it would adopt the new practice.

Here’s how the CMS state agency (SA) teams from CMS regional offices (RO) will be expected to work alongside AOs:

As the fight against COVID-19 presses on, patient safety remains a key focus in healthcare conversations around the world. In March 2020, the pandemic forced healthcare providers to quickly pivot existing care strategies and infection control protocols to address the influx of COVID-19 patients they were seeing, while also mitigating the spread of the coronavirus and continuing to provide acute care for non-COVID-19 patients.