In the September Healthcare Life Safety Compliance, we wrote about fire barriers as a fundamental method of protecting facilities.

Editor's note: We culled the following notebook items from presentations by George Mills, FASHE, CEM, CHFM, senior engineer at The Joint Commission, who spoke at the NFPA's World Safety Conference in June in Las Vegas and the American Society for Healthcare Engineering's annual conference in July in National Harbor, MD.

Minnesota's Department of Health found a hospital didn't follow its own policies on preventing surgical fires, which allegedly led to a patient being burned during surgery.

The five-year phase-in period established by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) for nursing homes to install sprinklers has started a clock ticking for a variety of work, all of which will cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

Editor's note: Each month in this column, the staff at fire protection consulting firm Koffel Associates, Inc., in Elkridge, MD, clarify the code references behind commonly misunder-stood healthcare requirements. Fire protection engineer Sharon Gilyeat, PE, authored this installment.