anyone gone through JCAHO recently?

HappyNurse2005, RN · Mar 3, 2006

Yep, they were here, unannounced recently. Early February. I wasn't at work on teh day they were on my unit all day (wahoo!) but i heard all about it.

-They dinged us for when a pt had a half pill, and we cut it in half, we would toss the unused half of it into the trash bag on our med cart instead of into the sharps box. (just lopressor, etc. never narcotics!)

-also on the pt education sheets, not checkign the box that said what their preferred learning method was.

-i know they also took a nurse or two and talked to them for 2 hours about their charting and why they wrote this, etc etc. (and b/c they did this, one of the nurse's pt's ate something when she was supposed to be npo, and delayed her surgery a day and pissed off the surgeon)

Im sure there was more, but we did well overall

SouthernLPN2RN, MSN, RN, APRN, NP · Mar 3, 2006

They did a mock code on one of the units at the hospital I work at. They did tell everyone it was going to be done, but it was originally thought it would be a hospital wide thing so everyone was studying all the codes.

McGyverRN · Mar 3, 2006

Ahh Jcaho...we all must be JCAHO accredited. And they make our llives so much easier, don't they. We pay them lots of money to come up with new rules every two years and tell us that we aren't following the rules correctly. If you were having chest pain, CVA, or in an MVA, would you tell the EMT to only take you to a JCAHO accredited hospital? And who else but health care workers even know what JCAHO accredidation signifies? Okay enough of my rant. I'm sure all of the nurse managers out there are cringing.

This year JCHAO is pushing patient education and documentation of education given, Evidenced based practice, pain management, and med safety. They expect us to withdraw and deliver our meds one pt at a time (our usual practice is to withdraw all meds for the hour and then deliver them one pt at a time.) Of course, they always have "suggestions" which we promptly respond to...leaving us with one more (or ten more) piece of paperwork to complete.

We did well on our last survery. And they also stole an RN for one hour, leaving her pts. without a nurse. Most issues revolved around documentation.

Good luck with your survey.

Marie_LPN, RN, LPN, RN · Mar 3, 2006

They focused on our sharps boxes, the big ones we have, saying somoene could put their hand in them. Well, where are we going to put the linear staplers when we're done then. :stone

They dinged us for when a pt had a half pill, and we cut it in half, we would toss the unused half of it into the trash bag on our med cart instead of into the sharps box.

We got this too, except we were told the sharps box wasn't acceptable, it had to be flushed down the toilet. Gotta love that consistency in their enforcement. :rolleyes:

McGyverRN · Mar 3, 2006

oh, one more thing, we aren't allowed to keep hemoccult/gastroccult solutions in the pt bathroom cabinets, because they can be mistaken for eyedrops.

Marie_LPN, RN, LPN, RN · Mar 3, 2006

And anything having to do with any meds had to be locked. Even prescription pads and drs. orders! Which you can imagine how well that went over lol.

princess_picklejuice · Mar 3, 2006

Our nurse surveyor was apparently on the team that created and initiated National Patient Safety Goals...our med reconciliation is only a few months old so we got a few recommendations for improvement. She really looked for Do Not Use abbreviations - most were physicians. Restraints is another big thing, especially nurse documentation.

Got dinged when one our nurses came out of an isolation room...with the patient's chart...degloved and went right into the next isolation room with the same gown and mask and other patient's chart...all in full view of the nurse surveyor. That's around the same time my brain aneurysm started throbbing...

ERERER · Mar 3, 2006

these are great, keep them coming!!! my manager has diarrhea worrying about this. appreciate you all!