JCAHO Requirement

Nurses General Nursing

Published

The Joint Commission is visiting us this week. Seems they are telling us we now have to provide a pill splitter for every patient. I guess I understand the reasoning behind it but this seems a little excessive. Why not put the effort into education about cleaning it between uses. How does your facility handle this?

Are they disposable?

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Specializes in kids.

They cost $3-10 at walgreens, prob twice that at pharmacy for LTC facility, still pretty cheap and each resident should have one.

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Specializes in Emergency, Telemetry, Transplant.

In the ER, our pill spliter consists of a plastic knife...I always know where it is and I never have to use it on 2 different patients pills. The downside is that it takes some force to get it to split some pills.

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In every nursing and hospital I have worked in each patient who needed a pill splitter and/or crusher had their own.

The incredidle price of $5.99 per splitter nearly bankrupted us...nearly.

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Specializes in Acute Rehab, IMCU, ED, med-surg.

Our hospital pharmacy splits any pills as needed and sends them to the floor in a sealed envelope w/specific bar code.

But I did clinicals at a smaller hospital that had a pill splitter in each room. I cleaned between splitting meds, but I'm not sure other staff did, and there wasn't any training or policy concerning this that I saw.

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Why aren't the meds coming from pharmacy already split?

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Specializes in Hospice + Palliative.

one of the med-surg floors I did a rotation on had one splitter, and it had a tendency to disappear....so they taught me to use an 18gauge to split pills. Pretty sure JCAHO would have a field day with that!

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I have never worked in a facility where every patient had their own pill crusher or splitter. They were all too cheap for that.

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Specializes in Hospice.
one of the med-surg floors I did a rotation on had one splitter, and it had a tendency to disappear....so they taught me to use an 18gauge to split pills. Pretty sure JCAHO would have a field day with that!

I've done that myself a few times, as well as using my fingernail if it is already scored. :yes: We have med carts for each nurse and each cart has a pill splitter and crusher on it, we are to clean each after every use. Like another post claimed, I do it, but i'm not sure if everybody does.

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Specializes in Intermediate care.

We just had joint commission leave. We don't have pill cutters for every patient and they didn't say anything about it. We are required to clean them in between uses though so maybe that was acceptable enough for them?? They make up such goofy rules. Something about how we needed to change the font color of high alert medications. Whatever....no hospital can be perfect and they are going to find something to change with every place they go to.

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Specializes in Cardiac/Telemetry.

We recently started providing pill cutters for each patient who needs a partial dose. They're $1 at the dollar store and I'm sure my hospital buys them in bulk for cheap.

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Specializes in ED; Med Surg.

I totally agree Jenni811! That's kind of why I brought it up...they always think of something! We have way too many patients to have a pill splitter for every patient -- but not that many meds get split, so it shouldn't really be a problem. Probably will end up coming out of my paycheck somehow :)

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