JCAHO Preparation the Joint Commission

JCAHO Preparation

The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, otherwise known as JACHO is a feared and often unknown aspect of health care review. In the work Dose of Fun AIDS JCAHO Preparation administrators and managers who are ultimately responsible for JCAHO survey success outline some "fun" ways in which they have helped staff prepare for a JCAHO survey in the operating room. Or staff was guided through long-term preparation, often rewards based that took the form of game shows and friendly reminders, some even including a mock survey experience for the staff to prepare and desensitize for the often nerve-racking experience of JCAHO survey.

Though the article is essentially very informative and offers suggestions that could prove to be very helpful with regard to helping staff desensitize and make the process fun, and therefore retentive it would seem that this would be a novel approach that might not hold staff's attention if it were used to prepare for every review. The information and standards associated with JCAHO reviews are significant and serious and require serious review that would likely be missed if the "fun" alternatives were the only ones utilized to challenge staff. Though this work is clear that the program they implemented utilized serious and "fun" review plans to stress the importance of the issue.

The article has limited information regarding shifting regulations and JCAHO focus topics, which are often different from one survey year to the following. Nor does this article adequately define JCAHO or the ever evolving standards it surveys for. This includes almost annual changes in drug storage and safety protocols as well as constantly evolving standards regarding security and patient confidentiality. (Bryant & Pejakovich, 2008) One example is standards change developments associated with, hospital preparedness and self-sufficiency following recent disaster situations, like Hurricane Katrina, where many health care facilities were lax in their ability to provide high level and even some minimal care to patients during a period of high need, high stress and infrastructural challenges like prolonged power outages and flooding;

Although the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) does not have a minimum requirement for hospital self-sufficiency, hospitals should strive toward being self-sufficient for up to seventy-two hours, says Dr. Robert Wise, vice president of the standards and survey methods division. Wise stresses that communities, not just individual hospitals, should prepare for large-scale disasters, because in many cases adequate response is contingent upon community support. To that end, JCAHO has published Health Care at the Crossroads: Strategies for Creating and Sustaining Community-wide Emergency Preparedness Systems, which calls for the development of scalable templates for community-based preparedness. ("Lessons from New Orleans," 2005, p. 58)

The response by JCAHO was to develop a whole new set of standards to be upheld by accredited facilities with regard to self-sufficiency infrastructure and emergency preparedness functions. In the or such changes might include having immediate access to alternative forms of power for active surgical procedures at the time of the impending disaster or power outage and at least some knowledge of what procedures need to be taken to transfer critical patients out of the area.