Two accreditation organizations merge, plus some Life Safety advice for winter

HFAP, the oldest CMS-approved hospital accreditation program in the nation, has merged with the Accreditation Commission for Health Care in a move designed to expand both organizations’ reach in the compliance world.

When it comes to systemic improvement of our healthcare delivery system, there is no shortage of ideas. Yet, even as the conversation has evolved to include important drivers of health outcomes such as the use of real-time data to guide interventions and care plans that address housing, transportation, and other social determinants of health, very little of what is discussed is truly actionable and easily scalable.

Over the years, physicians have been frequently accused of resisting change. In the face of tremendous new pressures—ranging from explosive levels of new technology and data to changing regulatory burdens and expectations—it is understandable that care providers may struggle to keep up. Now, Thomas H. Lee, MD, chief medical officer for Press Ganey and a physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, finds that this reluctance to change may itself be changing.

Assess your environmental cleaning protocols, ensure staff are trained properly, and verify the effectiveness of both as CMS increases scrutiny of infection prevention and control during the coronavirus pandemic.

Earlier this year CMS cited hospitals for not following their own policies and failing to ensure environmental services (EVS) personnel followed standard procedures for infection control during cleaning, including instances of cross-contamination of surfaces.

Last fall, as CMS and accrediting organizations increased their scrutiny of how hospitals address suicide risk, the question of whether security or police officers could be used as 1:1 monitors for high-risk patients became a recurring theme.

With temperatures dropping and snow on the way in many states, hospitals and clinics need to create a checklist of winter safety items. We asked Brad Keyes, CHSP, owner of Keyes Life Safety Compliance, about things that should be on that checklist from a life safety standpoint.

Because of the coronavirus pandemic, face masks have become ubiquitous (though occasionally controversial) in 2020—from N95 respirators to homemade masks made from bandanas and t-shirts. During the height of the wildfires on the West Coast this summer many agencies told residents to wear masks for another reason: smoke particles.