Newly published FAQs shed light on common confusions

In the spirit of its 2009 standards offering greater clarification to help hospital compliance, The Joint Commission has issued dozens of new FAQs, many of which address the EC and emergency management provisions.
Although it’s not spelled out in every FAQ, between the lines, The Joint Commission (formerly JCAHO) wants hospitals to show how their risk assessments justify not adopting recognized best practices if facilities choose alternative approaches, says Steven MacArthur, safety consultant at The Greeley Company, a division of HCPro, Inc., in Marblehead, MA.
Examples of such best practices include conducting infant abduction drills and prohibiting electric fans in patient rooms.
Although these best practices are not defined in the standards, surveyors can review the content of the FAQs as though they are part of the standards—so your risk assessment data must be solid if you’re not using best practices noted throughout the FAQs, says MacArthur, who is also a contributing editor to Briefings on Hospital Safety.
“They’re giving us a laundry list of the types of things that come up during surveys [for which] there isn’t a specific requirement,” MacArthur says. “Anything that comes up on an FAQ is, for all intents, surveyable.”
To read the full slate of FAQs online, go to www.
jointcommission.org/Standards/FAQs.