New Heads-Up Reports (HURs) are now available for all Joint Commission-accredited health care organizations.
HURs are located on an organization’s secure Joint Commission Connect® extranet site under the “Resources and Tools” tab. The Heads-Up Report library — which has more than 50 reports — has a new look, as the reports now are categorized according to topic and program, rather than quarter and date, making them easier to find and access.
HURs are separated into four sections:
- Why is this important/scope of the problem?
- Survey observations and contributing factors.
- How to identify problems in your own organization.
- What are some resources that can assist in mitigating risks in these areas?
With the introduction of the SAFER® Dashboard on Joint Commission Connect, organizations can now see a list of frequently scored standards and elements of performance (EPs) in real time. Organizations
then may search the HUR library for a corresponding and available report for those standards or EPs. HURS will continue to address frequently scored high-risk standards or EPs and provide examples of actual surveyor observations, potential contributing factors, and a checklist (using a tracer methodology) to help organizations identify similar issues in their own organizations prior to survey.
HURs provide clarity on which standards and EPs are being cited, as well as why they are being cited. Primary accreditation contacts are encouraged to distribute HURs to departments and individuals in their organizations who are responsible for the topics identified so any potential issues or risks can be addressed. (Contact: Brette Tschurtz, btschurtz@jointcommission.org)
A recently published Medscape article touched on The Joint Commission and Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare’s continued efforts in utilizing root cause analyses to study wrong-site surgeries and near misses to reduce those incidents.
Joint Commission and Center staff — Raji Thomas, Lisa Bukowski and Klaus Nether — were interviewed on how The Joint Commission used that insight to change surgical routines and protocols. The article also features the success of The Safe Surgery Project, a collaboration between the Center and eight hospitals and surgery centers that reduced the number of errors and near misses by 46% in the scheduling area, 63% in pre-op, and 51% in the OR area.
Read “MD’s Doing Wrong-Site Surgery: Why is it Still Happening?” in Medscape.
The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health is seeking input on current evidence-based, workplace and occupational safety and health interventions to prevent work-associated stress, support stress reduction, and foster positive mental health and well-being among the nation’s health workers.
Get more information or submit comments to the Federal Register. Comments are due by Nov. 26.
In efforts to follow accessibility guidelines, we no longer post PDF versions of our Joint Commission Online newsletter. Issues can still be printed in full by going to the main issue page of a particular issue and following your personal printer settings.
- Leading Hospital Improvement — Conducting Hybrid Surveys Via Technology for Deemed Hospitals During the Public Health Emergency: The Joint Commission has conducted more than 4,000 virtual events across all accreditation and certification programs and, earlier this year, we tested a hybrid survey approach. This approach involves a Joint Commission surveyor using technology to remotely review patient records, documents, and perhaps even human resources and credentialing files while the remaining members of the survey team are onsite. This approach has been approved by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) during the public health emergency (PHE) for deemed hospital surveys, writes Lisa DiBlasi-Moorehead, EdD, MSN, RN, CENP, CJCP, Associate Chief Nurse Executive.