In patient care today, teams of practitioners from various disciplines must coordinate their efforts in order to deliver care successfully. Frontline nurses and physicians must interact with social workers, therapists, physician assistants, nurse practitioners, and others to develop and carry out coordinated plans of care. Also, clinical team members must communicate with patients and their fam...

Tobacco dependence is the leading cause of death in persons with psychiatric and substance use disorders. This has lead to interest in the development of pharmacological and behavioral treatments for tobacco dependence in this subset of smokers. However, there has been little attention paid to the development of tobacco-free environments in psychiatric institutions despite the creation of smoke...

In 1995, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) expanded its patient rights standards to include requirements for assuring that hospital business practices would be ethical. Renamed “Patient Rights and Organization Ethics,” these standards are based on the realization that a hospital’s obligation to its patients is derived from two relationships: the patient-p...

Generic biologics (e.g., biosimilars) and medication safety related to Joint Commission hospital accreditation standards.

Organ donation has always been a part of the Joint Commission’s commitment to health care quality. In the 2004 hospital standards, JCAHO has continued to promote organ donation and cooperative organ procurement practices. Through its hospital accreditation standards, JCAHO has placed responsibility for organ donation squarely in the lap of hospital leadership. Standard LD.3.110 states that a ho...

Background Informed consent is an important part of the patients’ rights and hospitals are assigned to obtain informed consent before any diagnostic or therapeutic procedures. Obtaining an informed consent enables patients to accept or reject their care or treatments and prevent future contentions among patients and medical staff.   Methods This survey was carried out during 2011-2. We assessed...

A New Scoring Methodology Project REFRESH (see related articles on pages 3 and 5), the Joint Commission’s multiphase process improvement project, includes a transformative approach for identifying and communicating risk levels associated with deficiencies cited during surveys. This Survey Analysis for Evaluating Risk (SAFER) approach provides organizations with additional information related to...

1 Institute for Technical Cooperation in Health, Potomac, Maryland, United States of America. Send correspondence to: Humberto M. Novaes, INTECH, Inc., 12 Pasture Brook Court, Potomac, Maryland 20854-2954, United States of America; telephone: (301) 610-9620; fax: (301) 610-9621; e-mail: [email protected] 2 Case Western Reserve University, Medical School, Cleveland, Ohio, United States of America...