The Joint Commission recognizes that healthcare workers form the backbone of our healthcare system, providing patient care and crucial services despite facing challenges such as workplace violence, burnout, and exposure to hazards. Healthcare organizations need access to high quality resources to help address these challenges. To help organizations in their efforts to promote the safety and well-being of their workforce, The Joint Commission has created a Workforce Safety and Well-Being Resource Center.
This resource center has a collection of resources on the topics of workplace violence prevention, worker well-being, and worker safety. Our goal is to equip healthcare leaders and staff with the tools, strategies, and best practices they need to safeguard the health and well-being of their teams, empowering them to deliver consistently excellent care.
Workplace violence is a serious and growing problem in healthcare. Not only does it impact victims, but it also can adversely impact employee morale, increase staff turnover, reduce productivity, create a fearful organizational culture, and compromise patient care.
The high incidence of workplace violence prompted the creation of new Joint Commission requirements implemented in 2022. These requirements provide a framework to guide organizations in developing effective workplace violence prevention systems, including leadership oversight, policies and procedures, reporting systems, data collection and analysis, post-incident strategies, training, and education to decrease workplace violence.
The Joint Commission understands that many organizations struggle with addressing the complex issues surrounding workforce safety and well-being. The resource center provides freely accessible tools and strategies that organizations can use, regardless of where they are on their journey to address these issues.
Effective Jan. 1, 2025, the Infection Prevention and Control (IC) chapter has been revised for Joint Commission accredited assisted living communities, home care organizations, and nursing care centers. This is a continuation of the IC chapter rewrite project that resulted in a revised IC chapter for critical access hospitals and hospitals that was effective July 1, 2024.
The goal of the IC chapter rewrite was to help organizations develop a strong framework for their IC activities, while aligning requirements more closely to law and regulation and the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Conditions of Participation (CoPs) for home health agencies, hospices, home infusion therapy, and long-term care facilities. Effective and well-organized IC practices in nonhospital settings are needed to prevent severe illness, hospitalization, and death for patients and residents. The IC chapter revisions include the following:
- Eliminated requirements that do not add value to accreditation surveys so that organizations can focus on the structures that support IC quality and safety. This is in keeping with the ongoing initiative to simplify standards content and structure.
- Removed elements of performance (EPs) related to waste management and responding to an influx of potentially infectious patients. These were redundant to existing Environment of Care (EC) and Emergency Management (EM) requirements.
- Created new IC Assessment Tools that detail the IC practices, structures, and documentation needed to meet the IC requirements. The program-specific tools include components that may be evaluated during survey and standard/EP locations for scoring. The tools were developed using regulations, the CMS Long Term Care Infection Control Worksheet, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Core IC Practices. For the applicable programs, the tool will be posted to the Joint Commission Connect® extranet site in July 2024 and it will be added to the survey activity guides in December 2024.
The new and revised requirements, a program-specific guide showing where concepts from the old EPs have moved in the new EPs, and service applicability information for home care organizations will be posted on the Prepublication Standards page of The Joint Commission’s website. The requirement will publish online in the fall 2024 E-dition® update to the accreditation manuals for the applicable programs. For those customers who purchase them, the 2025 hard-copy and PDF versions of the accreditation manuals will include these new and revised requirements.
For more information, please contact The Joint Commission’s Standards and Survey Methods.
Managing care coordination and transitions for patients with complex needs is a significant challenge that can create strains for clinicians, patients, and their caregivers. Register for a one-hour webinar on Thursday, July 25 at 2:00 pm ET hosted by NQF’s Healthcare Provider Organizations Stakeholder Advisory Council on utilizing technology for care coordination and transition management.
In this webinar, experts will discuss practical strategies and technological innovations to streamline care and improve coordination for patients when they transition from hospital to home. Learn from case studies and hear about best practices to implement tech-driven solutions that enhance patient outcomes.