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EM is no longer just a couple of surveyor questions
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July 1, 2010
As expected, The Joint Commission puts EM under the microscope
In 2008, when Bill Mangieri took over as the emergency management (EM) specialist at St. Luke’s Cornwall Hospital in Newburgh, NY, he knew he had only about 14 months to prepare for the facility’s next Joint Commission survey, and he knew he needed every minute of it.
“There was not one area of the program that complied with The Joint Commission’s EM standards,” Mangieri says. “Despite the enormous amount of work it took to achieve a baseline of compliance, time was on my side. The Joint Commission showed up at the three-year mark, which gave me 14 months to prepare.”
And the work paid off. When Joint Commission (formerly JCAHO) surveyors arrived for a much anticipated, unannounced survey in early February, the inspection concluded with “high marks and great praise” for the EM program, he says. The hospital had no requirements for improvement when it came to its EM program.
The hospital CEO, who described it as one of the best Joint Commission surveys in recent facility history, said one of the main areas for the success of the survey was the EM program.
“If I were to summarize our survey in a few words, thorough and intense would come to mind,” says Mangieri.
The new survey format focuses on documentation relating to the EM standards The Joint Commission separated into its own chapter of the 2009 Comprehensive Accreditation Manual for Hospitals (CAMH).
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