Long-Term Care Survey Alert
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The JCAHO national 2005 patient safety goals for long-term care facilities include falls, flu shots and more. The Joint Commission's 2005 patient safety goals for long-term care raise the bar for resident safety. Accredited facilities will have to implement a fall reduction program, including a "transfer protocol" for moving residents safely.
And to combat preventable infectious illness, the patient safety goals require facilities to develop and implement a protocol for administering flu and pneumococcus vaccine.
"The 2005 national patient safety goals have been identified by JCAHO's sentinel event advisory group, which monitors medical and healthcare related errors," says Marianna Grachek, MSN, RN, JCAHO's executive director for long-term care and assisted living accreditation programs. JCAHO will post on its Web site some FAQs related to each national patient safety goal, which will provide more guidance on its implementation, Grachek tells Eli.
About 11 percent of the nation's 16,000-plus nursing homes are accredited by JCAHO (the only accrediting body for nursing homes), according to Grachek.
Review the 2005 patient safety goals for long-term care at jcaho.org.
Nursing facilities still show room for improvement in assessing and communicating residents' pain. That's according to a study by Yale University researchers reported in a recent issue of Archives of Internal Medicine. The researchers surveyed directors of nursing from 63 nursing homes in New Haven County, CT to determine how often nurses assess residents' pain, when nurses notify prescribing clinicians about residents' pain, how often nursing staff assesses pain and when nurses reassess pain after a clinician's intervention.
In 76 percent of facilities, nurses assessed pain in residents thought to be without pain at least quarterly. Only 46 percent of homes assessed residents with pain at least every shift, according to the study.
Read the abstract of the study on pain assessment at
http://archinte.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/164/14/1508
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The JCAHO national 2005 patient safety goals for long-term care facilities include falls, flu shots [...]