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Mental Health Patients: Keeping Staff & Patients Safe Without a Behavioral Health Services Unit
With CMS and The Joint Commission increasingly pushing to make sure facilities are following requirements and standards regarding mental health, now is a good time to assess your own facility’s mental health resources. But what happens when you’re in a facility without a behavioral health services unit? How do you keep patients and staff safe?
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Four Reasons Psychiatric Care and Behavioral Health Hospitals are Vulnerable to Noncompliance with the CMS CoPs
What makes psychiatric care and behavioral health so vulnerable to noncompliance with the CoPs? We know that’s a complex question, but here are four possible answers
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Patient Handoffs: Where Mistakes are Made
A patient handoff (also known as transitioning) is both the act of passing a patient between caregivers and the information exchanged between the sender (the provider giving away the patient) and the receiver (the provider taking the patient).These transfers can be as dramatic as airlifting a patient to a specialty hospital and telling the EMTs that the patient thinks she can fly and will try to jump out of the helicopter, or as mundane as a nurse ending her shift and telling her replacement the patient has been taken off a certain medicin
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Hospital Leaders Like to Think that “Immediate Jeopardy Can’t Happen Here” — Until it Does
Despite state and federal regulations, and private hospital accreditation programs that try to ensure high-quality care, errors occur in hospitals that result in patient injuries. Many errors are due to process failures rather than unpredictable accidents. Process failures can result in harm or
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Simple Symptoms Often Missed That Predict Costly CMS Compliance Issues
In the last several years, hospitals across the country have experienced findings of Immediate Jeopardy in the wake of Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and state Department of Health surveys that have become more and more rigorous. And, by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) are leading many healthcare professionals to believe that such scrutiny will only continue to increase.
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Restructuring Communication and Establishing Organizational Improvements in the Laboratory with Interim Leadership
A hospital in the Midwest needed to fill a leadership vacancy after struggling with performance issues from their previous Laboratory Director for several months. The organization’s leadership had been trying to collaborate with him, but the Director was unable to...
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The Joint Commission Updates Emergency Management Requirements
The Joint Commission announces updates to its emergency management requirements, effective November 15, 2017. These updates align with Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS)’s final rule on emergency preparedness to ensure healthcare professionals and...
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Happy Healthcare Quality Week!
This week is Healthcare Quality Week. Compass recognizes that healthcare quality professionals serve important roles in improving efficiencies and maximizing an organization's output, all while maintaining a culture that establishes safe, quality care. While their...
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Accreditation Options Update: Going Bare — The State Option as an Alternative to Accreditation
Each state has a designated agency, usually the state department of health, contracted with CMS for supervision and evaluation of all participating hospitals. Most hospitals encounter a state survey following a complaint, but CMS also requires that states conduct a validation (follow-up to accrediting agency survey to assure comprehensiveness) of 5% of accreditation surveys.
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Qualities of a Hospital Leader that Heighten the Patient Experience
Integral for the smooth functioning of a hospital, high patient experience scores are necessary for the satisfaction of all members within the facility. The patient experience starts with the leaders of a hospital, clinic, or other facility of a health system. Leaders...
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