Revised Infection Prevention and Control chapter for assisted living, home care, nursing care centers
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 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.