Experts offer tips to meet emergency planning rules

One thing that proved crystal clear at HCPro’s Second Annual Hospital Safety Symposium is the overriding importance of emergency management to safety officers.

The Joint Commission (formerly JCAHO) continues to emphasize a scalable emergency operations plan that can flex depending on the severity of the crisis at hand, said symposium keynote speaker Dean Samet, CHSP, director of regulatory compliance at Smith Seckman & Reid, Inc., based in Nashville.

Joint Commission officials “want you to be able to handle little emergencies and ‘Oh my God’ big emergencies,” said Samet, a former associate director of standards for the accreditor.