Accreditation

Keeping up with the growing list of EC demands

Briefings on The Joint Commission, February 1, 2007

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Editor's note: The following excerpt is taken from The JCAHO Survey Coordinator's Handbook, Eighth Edition, by Steven W. Bryant and Patricia Pejakovich, RN, BSN, MPA, CPHQ, recently published by HCPro, Inc. Among many new features is a chapter on the environment of care (EC), written by contributor Steven MacArthur. Call 877/727-1728 to order.

This chapter addresses your role in EC tracers and EC activities so that you and your organization's EC team are always survey-ready. We have provided many helpful tools to assist you in these efforts, printed at the end of this chapter and available on the CD-ROM that came with this book, so that you don't have to recreate them (see a sample tool, EC/IC tracer checklist, in the Tools Library).

In light of The Joint Commission's increasing focus on issues relative to the Life Safety Code® (LSC), including the repurposing of the building tour to spotlight your organization's compliance strategies and the addition of the emergency management tracer in 2006, it is likely that your EC team has never played a more prominent role in the survey process. From a practical survey-management standpoint, there are even certain processes (see rule CON04 in your Comprehensive Accreditation Manual for Hospitals) that can result in immediate findings of conditional accreditation or even preliminary denial of accreditation.

This is an excerpt from a member only article. To read the article in its entirety, please login or subscribe to Briefings on The Joint Commission.

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