CMS sticks with traditional fire watch stance
Healthcare Life Safety Compliance, September 1, 2009
This is an excerpt from a member only article. To read the article in its entirety, please login or subscribe to Healthcare Life Safety Compliance.
For now, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) will continue to observe fire watch requirements as outlined in the Life Safety Code® (LSC), says James Merrill, life safety specialist at the agency.
That statement appears to put CMS’ position at conflict with parts of The Joint Commission’s (formerly JCAHO) new fire watch policy, which we first detailed in the August Healthcare Life Safety Compliance.
The Joint Commission still expects hospitals to institute fire watches, but now differentiates between scheduled system outages (e.g., servicing a system) and unscheduled disruptions (e.g., a component failure).
This is an excerpt from a member only article. To read the article in its entirety, please login or subscribe to Healthcare Life Safety Compliance.
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