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Be careful with additional abbreviations

Quality Improvement Monitor, June 16, 2005

Continue to enforce compliance with abbreviations that are not on the JCAHO's unapproved list because surveyors will make sure your staff follow your policy, a commission surveyor said.

The JCAHO on May 31 said hospitals will no longer have to choose three abbreviations in addition to the nine already required. But surveyors will check for those additional abbreviations if hospitals have more than nine on their list, Darryl Rich, PharmD, MBA, said June 12 during the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists 2005 Summer Meeting in Boston.
 
"If you do have three more or five more or six more, you are at risk because we still would expect 90% compliance," Rich said.

The list of unapproved abbreviations will apply to all orders or handwritten medication-related documentation, including free-text computer entries, the JCAHO said in a statement posted at www.jcaho.org. Preprinted order forms are also subject to unapproved-abbreviation scrutiny by surveyors, the JCAHO said.

Eliminating unapproved abbreviations is one of the most frequent areas of noncompliance, with 27% of hospitals surveyed in 2004 receiving citations, according to JCAHO data.

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