Plenty of work to do before 2009 standards take effect

The Joint Commission’s revised EC standards and new life safety and emergency management chapters take effect January 1, 2009, which doesn’t leave a lot of time for safety committees to digest and incorporate the updates.

Safety officers should make an effort to read the new standards, says Teri Alameda, consultant and owner of Teri Alameda Health & Safety Consultation, Inc., in Portland, OR. That may seem like obvious advice, but it could take more than one hour to go through the changes, which in a busy workday isn’t always easy to schedule.