SPECIAL EDITION: Highlights from the Hospital Safety Symposium

• Verify that your emergency operations plan describes the process for ending emergency response efforts and beginning recovery steps, said keynote speaker Dean Samet, director of regulatory compliance at Smith Seckman & Reid, Inc., based in Nashville. “You’re going to have to determine those time frames” and who has the authority to make these decisions, Samet added.
• Life Safety Code citations under EC.5.20 often center on everyday problems--“the little things you see listed in the building maintenance program and the Statement of Conditions,” Samet said.
• Look at your hazard vulnerability analysis and evaluate which of those potential scenarios could isolate your hospitals for 96 hours during a community disaster, said Steve MacArthur, a safety consultant for The Greeley Company in Marblehead, MA. This may help you comply with EC.4.12.
• Using an audience member as a model and tomato juice as “blood,” safety expert Terry Jo Gile of North Fort Myers, FL, showed how lab coats should properly repel fluids, not soak them up.