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Michelle GoodMan
Accreditationandpatientsafety.edited2.docxACCREDITATION AND PATIENT SAFETY 1
Accreditation and patient safety
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Role of accreditation in ensuring patient safety
Accreditation has played a crucial role in ensuring the safety and quality of healthcare services provided to patients. The quality and safety of patient care are crucial elements of the performance of healthcare systems.
The CMS demands all the hospitals and other healthcare organizations to be accredited through state inspection to receive before receiving any Medicare reimbursement. Accreditation allows the patient who is willing to enter an avenue, clinic, and hospital to ensure that the facility is safe, effective, and consistent with the latest clinical evidence. The aspect is particularly crucial to hospitals where patients are expected to be acutely and severely ill, but all the information suggests that the care quality is optimal. While pursuing accreditation, healthcare facilities may opt to work with several accrediting bodies to pay a fee to undergo the survey process.
If done right, accreditation will assist potential patients in knowing whether their respective hospitals will provide effective, safe, and quality care. Hospital accreditation will remain a cornerstone of ensuring that the basic levels of quality are met for the health care system assesses. Considering the extra workload and high costs associated with accreditation, hospitals should ensure systematic evaluations of the value of accreditation are constructive. Research has proven that accredited hospitals are more likely to adhere to the evidence-based process; hence, they will be assured of quality care and safe healthcare services.
Joint commission national safety goals and survey
The relationship found between an organization's achievement in meeting national safety goals and the results from the joint commission survey is horizontal so that they go hand in hand with each other. The joint commission survey has been established to focus on patients' safety, which is designed to be organization-specific consistent, and the support to organization attempts to improve the safety and quality on their path to achieve zero harm. Any healthcare facility that can receive satisfactory results from the survey implies that it has been able to comply with NPSG standards. The survey is usually executed between 18 and 36 months after the previous full survey. The findings from the survey are posted in the joint commission secured network. The healthcare facility will then receive improvements to follow up with the submission of the evidence of standard compliance report. The accreditation is awarded immediately after the survey if the facility does not receive any RFIs (Baker, 2017). On the other hand, accredited organizations are needed to comply with NPSGs; they will not be able to lose their accreditation solely pasted on not meeting the benchmarks. In case the organization can comply with applicable NPSGs, they will be able to publicize their compliance. The national safety goals have been established and implemented in each fiscal year set to set the standard of specific actions. The actions are required to be followed by each accredited organization to prevent possible errors from occurring. For an organization to receive its own accreditation, it needs to be surveyed for a minimum of one time every 39months to assess its compliance.
How to assess readiness for the joint commission survey
The leaders should spend a week with the staff members to assess whether the unit is compliant with the crash cart checks, separate clean and dirty equipment, and keep the hallways free of clutter (Rantanen et al., 2017). It is first important to get the initial response from the staff after mentioning the joint commission. The leaders should communicate the importance of understanding that the survey acts as a real-time assessment of how effectively and safely, the organization will manage families and patients' care. It is crucial to use the trends of tracer activities to improve the processes. The organization should always communicate with the staff about the ongoing improvements to demonstrate compliance with the joint commission standards. One should also assess whether the employees understand the organization's policies and procedures for incidences such as fire, disaster, infection control, occurrence reporting, adverse drug events, reassessment, restraints, and advance directives. The staff should be familiar with the joint commission’s national patient safety goals and what the company has developed to address these goals. A company ready for the survey will have its employees ready and well equipped with knowledge about tracers.
Preparing for the joint commission's survey
Thorough preparation is needed to ensure that there is a successful accreditation visit. The organization should establish a plan with a timeline for all the preparation activities. Responsibilities should be assigned for each standard category and all activities. The organization will be better positioned to assess the joint commission survey if it is well familiar with the standards. The focus should be mainly on each standard's intent with a thorough identification of example evidence (Anderson et al., 2020). All the staff members should be educated on the set standards and the organization's strategies for meeting them. The patients should be informed about the visit and the possible questions they are likely to encounter. At least a one-year track record on evidence should be kept. The organization should prepare a mock survey and score all the applicable standards. Assessing the accreditation will demand one to compare and contrast various aspects. One should compare joint commission standards together with organizational performance.
References
Baker, D. W. (2017). History of The Joint Commission’s pain standards: lessons for today’s prescription opioid epidemic. Jama, 317(11), 1117-1118.
Rantanen, J., Lehtinen, S., Valenti, A., & Iavicoli, S. (2017). A global survey on occupational health services in selected international commission on occupational health (ICOH) member countries. BMC Public Health, 17(1), 1-15.
