Who died and made Joint Commission "God"

I'm just a peon, of course, and am not privy to all that transpires, but I'm on a shared governance council and we're the first clinical faces that see the most recent changes. I believe that the hospital administration has groveled, and promised, and performed everything they have been told to do. There has been a bunch of communication back and forth with the JC, in terms of filing their action plans and also explaining why certain things may not be infractions given our particular hospital situation and locality. (However, very little of the latter... mostly the groveling.)

Our hospital has some significant strengths. We have been working out rear-ends off. It's all we've thought about for months and months and months. With the exception of two much smaller hospitals, we are IT for a huge geographical area. Our mock surveyor found a whole long list of things that are outstanding, but found 13 areas that would flunk us (in their view.)

75% or more of all the operating rooms will be gone. I KNOW that if they shut us down, surgeons will be doing stuff in stand-alone surgi-centers that they have no business doing. Patients will have to travel at least 2 hours to the nearest medical center which is, itself stretched to the limit. Our state is one of the worst in nursing shortages. If our hospital closes down any nurse that can leave the area for work will. We'll never get those nurses back.

Dear God help us and thousands of ill patients if they shut us down.

Oh, I forgot. Joint Commission just appointed themselves to be God.

Just talked to my daughter who is an anesthesiologist. JC made them put a ringy-dingy bell in each OR room. Circulating nurse rings the bell and everyone stops and does their little final check. Maybe JC hasn't told us about the little bell and that's what they're going to fail us on.

If only they were consistent!

Has anyone had a surveyor hide their name badge and walk off with a chart? Yep. Now the rule in our hospital is that the charts have to be in our line of sight at all times. Not the confused and impulsive patients our unit deals with. No, they can be outside of our peripheral vision. But the charts, THOSE we have to watch at all times. The chart rack!!! Can you believe this is how they improve patient safety!!!!! (Yes, of course privacy is important. But how can I keep my eyes on the charts when my brain injured patient is half-way over the side-rails?)

If a bunch of people die in our area as a result of a bad decision by JC, I swear I will contact the lawyers to take them down in a class action law-suit.

Our Core Measures are a mixed bag. On AMI we are superb and way beat the national average in door to cath-lab times. Our dicubitus rates are very low. When it comes to Pneumonia and CHF... we're near average, I think. With SCIP, I think we were below average but are making head-way.

I had not thought of that business about us being a high cost state. We have challenges that other states don't have... but that's true of lots of states. The crime is in instituting cookie-cutter standards and solutions to every hospital everywhere in the nation.

Oh, my... we are sooo tired of this. Our manager and supervisor were in tears last week, just SURE that they were going to be fired. (Like that would really help us pass!)

How long can you hold up under this kind of tension. Just trying to give care when we are understaffed is tough enough... we had no vacancies on our unit, were down 2 RN's and 2 CNA's. We all started the day with 6 patients, and ER was trying to send up admissions. And in all of that, we are supposed to have PERFECT documentation, clean and tidy rooms, happy patients, label all IV tubing, keep clutter out of the hallway even though they make us use those mobile computers which cannot stand in the hallway... foam in/foam out, don't just know the fire evacuation route... you have to know 2 evacuation routes, know where in the chart every conceivable piece of information is, secure the charts at all times... Aaaaaach! Maybe we should start a thread "Stupid and Impossible things Joint Commission makes us do".