Nursing

Eight tips to ace your JCAHO survey

Staff Development Weekly: Insight on Evidence-Based Practice in Education, April 2, 2004

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Want to help your hospital ace the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Health Care Organizations' (JCAHO's) new survey process? Share these eight tips with your colleagues:

1. Get ready for more contact with surveyors. Practice with your peers on how you will respond to surveyor questions.
2. Know your facility's policies and procedures. Surveyors may review these before observing whether staff follow them.
3. Take extra care with documentation. Surveyors will compare patient charts to the care that was actually given.
4. Keep an eye out at all times for ways to improve processes and patient care. Remember, surveyors will be using data from your hospital to help guide surveys.
5. Make sure you offer surveyors consistent information on patient care.
6. Show off when you can. If a surveyor asks a question that offers the opportunity to reveal how your performance improvement project decreased falls by 10%, then talk about it.
7. Regardless of when you're up for survey, prepare now. It's easier to get your thoughts together when you're not under pressure.
8. Relax. You know your processes better than the surveyor.

Editor's note: The above excerpt is from the new online course "Nursing CE Series: Preparing nursing for the new JCAHO survey process." For more information on this and other Nursing courses, go to www.hcprofessor.com. and click on Nursing CE Series. HCPro, Inc., is accredited as a provider of continuing education in nursing by the American Nurses Credentialing Center's Commission on Accreditation.



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