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Mock system tracers can help your facility prepare for an unannounced survey

Staff Development Weekly: Insight on Evidence-Based Practice in Education, August 18, 2006

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If you're bracing for your first unannounced survey, Patricia Garvey, MSN, RN, can't overemphasize the importance of doing mock tracers. And not just mock patient tracers, but mock system tracers, too.

Garvey, the director of quality and management and education at Fairlawn Rehabilitation Hospital in Worcester, MA, says weekly mock tracers gave all staff at the 100-bed acute-care rehabilitation facility ideas about what to expect during an actual survey.

Garvey has some tips from her experience:

1. Policies-Although surveyors didn't ask for specific policies, they did ask questions of staff to learn whether policies matched practice.
2. Be realistic-You can't anticipate every question, and you can't know exactly what the survey experience will be like until you've gone through it. Even though Fairlawn had a corporate quality director from another hospital in its system come in March to do a mock survey, nothing really can prepare staff for the next survey as well as the actual survey, Garvey says.

To get more tips, go to Briefings on JCAHO (BOJ). For the cost of just three stories, you can get the entire August issue of BOJ. Click here to choose between the PDF and HTML versions for just $30. Subscribers to the online version of BOJ have free access to this article. Subscribers to the print newsletter can find this article in their August issue.

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