The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations was founded in 1951 as a private, not-for-profit organization that evaluates and accredits hospitals and other healthcare organizations. In 1987, the JCAHO launched its Agenda for Change to create a more modern and sophisticated accreditation process to place primary emphasis on actual performance. Coincident with this new emphas...

OBJECTIVE To describe the effect of implementing the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organization's guidelines for procedural sedation and analgesia (PSA) on the frequency of adverse events occurring during sedation. DESIGN Prospective, descriptive study. SETTING Urban, tertiary care children's hospital. PARTICIPANTS Patients requiring PSA. INTERVENTIONS A PSA committee ...

OBJECTIVE This first article, of a two-part series, presents the foundation for patient education in the nuclear medicine department. The need for patient education through mandates, such as the JCAHO, is discussed and the relevant literature surrounding the delivery of patient education is reviewed. The emphasis is on proper learning by patients, including the means of maximizing the facilitat...

New patient safety standards from JCAHO that require hospitals to disclose to patients all unexpected outcomes of care took effect 1 July 2001. In an early 2002 survey of risk managers at a nationally representative sample of hospitals, the vast majority reported that their hospital's practice was to disclose harm at least some of the time, although only one-third of hospitals actually had boar...

Communication of information between healthcare providers is a fundamental component of patient care. The information shared between providers who are changing shifts, referred to as "handover," helps plan patient care, identifies safety concerns and facilitates continuity of information. Absent or inaccurate information can have deleterious effects on patient care. According to the Joint Commi...

The Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO), in Standard NC 3.4.2., currently requires that our method for determining staffing has both face validity and inter-rater reliability. Furthermore, in LD.1.3, they require a plan to provide services in response to identified patient needs. In LD.2.1.4, the standards require that the leaders recommend a sufficient num...

In 1994, the Hospital Library Service Program of the Central New York Library Resources Council conducted a study to evaluate the usefulness, impacts, and potential services of eleven hospital libraries in a four-county area in New York State; determine the degree to which the libraries comply with Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) standard IM.9.2; and provid...

mTRODUCTION Jn 198'7 the Joint Com~i t t ee on Accreditation of Kealth~,sare Organizagons (JCABO) initiated core measures to evaluate the quality s f care for specific disease entities,l such as cs ty acquired pnessrnoBLaia (CAP). CAP is broadly de5ned by the InfecI;iwas Disease Society ofAmerica (DSA) as m acute infection sfthe pulmonav parenchyma, accompanied by the presence of an acute infil...

One of the most challenging roles of medical providers serving children is to appropriately assess and treat their pain. Pain is one of the most misunderstood, underdiagnosed, and undertreated/ untreated medical problems, particularly in children. New JCAHO regulations regard pain as "the fifth vital sign" and require caregivers to regularly assess and address pain. This review focuses on the c...

In 1992, the Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations ( JCAHO) passed a mandate that all its approved hospitals put in place a means for addressing ethical concerns. Although the particular process the hospital uses to address such concerns—ethics consultant, ethics forum, ethics committee—may vary, the hospital or healthcare ethics committee (HEC) is used most often. I...