Approved: Revisions to the emergency management exercise requirement for home care.

of performance (EPs) for “Emergency Management” (EM) Standard EM.03.01.03, which addresses emergency management exercises for the home care program. Revised EP 1 and new EPs 18 and 19 become effective January 1, 2013. The EM standards have always required organizations to align the scope of their emergency management exercises with the scope of their emergency operations plan (EOP) and response efforts. Organizations that plan to serve patients during an emergency may have complex plans that require multiple response capabilities; organizations that plan to close and reopen after the emergency may have simpler plans that focus on issues such as patient and staff communications and continuity of operations. To test their EOPs, organizations may use any type of exercise as long as it contains certain essential features and effectively tests the limits of the organization’s EOP. The 19 segments served by the Home Care Accreditation Program provide care, treatment, and services primarily in community-based settings. As such, the exercise expectations for this program require more flexibility than facility-based settings (such as hospitals) and allow the home care organization to use tabletop or functional exercises (or hybrids of the two). A review of the 19 home care segments revealed four common components that all organizations should exercise— as well as two additional components that organizations serving the most vulnerable individuals should exercise. Joint Commission staff considered these components when developing the following revisions at Standard EM.03.01.03: