• E-mail
• Print
• RSS

Expert: Proposed CMS emergency preparedness standards are ’not a radical departure’

Hospital Safety Insider, August 31, 2016

Want to receive articles like this one in your inbox? Subscribe to Hospital Safety Insider!

Now that the CMS has adopted the 2012 Life Safety Code (LSC), safety experts are looking ahead to the next regulation with which hospitals will need to comply.

Most notably missing from the CMS adoption of the LSC is the lack of an adoption of emergency preparedness standards. That's because CMS is highly anticipated to adopt its own standards, in all likelihood by the end of 2016, according to many life safety experts.

The new emergency preparedness requirements were proposed by the Department of Health and Human Services in December 2013, and are meant to prevent the disruption of hospital services on a mass scale such as that experienced during disasters such as Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, and in New York city during Hurricane Sandy.

The proposed rule is in final consideration by CMS and would, among other things, require hospitals to track displaced patients, provide care at alternate sites, and handle volunteers. By law, CMS must adopt the rule by December 2016 or the entire process must be repeated.

This is an excerpt from the monthly healthcare safety resource Healthcare Life Safety Compliance. Subscribers can read the rest of the article here. Non-subscribers can find out more about the journal, its benefits, and how to subscribe by clicking here.
 

Want to receive articles like this one in your inbox? Subscribe to Hospital Safety Insider!

• E-mail to a Colleague
• Print
• RSS
• Archive