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...

Over the past 25 years, the Joint Commission for the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations has changed its guidelines regarding religious/spiritual care of hospitalized patients to increase attention concerning this aspect of hospital-based care. Little empirical evidence assesses the extent to which hospitals relied on hospital chaplains as care providers during these years. This study inv...

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...

The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) requires disclosure of medical errors related to sentinel events. At the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, we have developed an effective curriculum for teaching third-year medical students this content. The instructional program lasts a half day and consists of large group lectures combined wi...

Endophthalmitis is a devastating complication of cataract surgery and occurs in about 0.1% of patients. However, few if any health care institutions have processes in place to monitor the rate of infection after cataract surgery. Such was the case at our institution, where complications associated with phacoemulsification procedures (cataract surgery) were neither monitored for nor reported. In...

Senior hospital executives responding to a 2005 national telephone survey conducted for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) report that Hospital Compare and other public reports on hospital quality measures have helped to focus hospital leadership attention on quality matters. They also report increased investment in quality improvement (QI) projects and in people and systems to ...

Those overseeing clinical engineering (CE) functions at the top policy level--the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO), and others in the profession--depend on sporadic assessments of nonstandard samplings of data when analyzing CE functions such as maintenance compliance, risk and failure analysis, and inventory managemen...