Too many of our nation's hospitals have been become complacent over disaster preparedness. They develop a document to meet a licensure requirement or a joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations standard. The language is minimal and when the document is exercised, only a few portions (personnel recall and mass casualty, in particular) are tested. It would benefit hospitals to...

background informed consent is an important part of the patients’ rights and hospitals are assigned to obtain informed consent before any diagnostic or therapeutic procedures. obtaining an informed consent enables patients to accept or reject their care or treatments and prevent future contentions among patients and medical staff.   methods this survey was carried out during 2011-2. we assessed...

OBJECTIVE To examine whether performance measures improve more in accredited hospitals than in non-accredited hospital. DESIGN AND SETTING A historical follow-up study was performed using process of care data from all public Danish hospitals in order to examine the development over time in performance measures according to participation in accreditation programs. PARTICIPANTS All patients a...

The system accreditation option for ambulatory care organizations has been revised to require surveying of all sites providing moderate, deep, and general sedation/anesthesia. This revision is effective immediately. Launched in 2006, the system accreditation option is an evaluation approach that awards a single accreditation decision to a “system” (an organization with a corporate office or mai...

The Joint Commission’s Accreditation Committee approved the 2014 accreditation and certification decision rules for all accreditation and certification programs. The revised accreditation decision rules are effective for surveys as of January 1, 2014, while the revised certification decision rules are effective immediately. Revisions are shown in the boxes on pages 3–7 for accreditation program...

Physician performance failures are not rare and pose substantial threats to patient welfare and safety. Few hospitals respond to such failures promptly or effectively. Failure to ensure the quality and safety of the performance of colleagues is a breach of medicine's fiduciary responsibility to the public. A major reason for this deficiency is the hospitals' lack of formal systems to monitor ph...

Perspectives, pages 8–13), The Joint Commission will implement new memory care accreditation requirements for nursing care centers effective July 1, 2014. To build on these new requirements, which have been designed in response to the prevalence of dementia in nursing homes, The Joint Commission will also offer a new optional certification product for accredited nursing care centers. The option...