I saw this quote from one of my favorite former college football coaches, Lou Holtz. It reminded me of when I had just gotten married and I decided to build a deck. How hard could it be, I thought. The lumber yard dumped the pile of wood on our front lawn. My friend and I started to carry the lumber to the back. Well, we slipped in the mud, dropped the lumber and basically took a long time to carry just a portion of the delivery. My father-in-law, a retired carpenter, eventually arrived. He had a good laugh and then showed us how to carry the wood balancing it in each hand, many pieces at a time. There is an easy way to do things; it’s the people who are experts at something that really know how to succeed. Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers (200) talked about 10,000 hours as how long it takes for someone to become an expert.
When preparing for the Joint Commission, depending on people that have been through inspections many times provides a better probability for success. For example, I was talking to our hospitality team and they were telling me that Joint Commission surveyors are focusing on a number of physical environment features, including multiple settings, layout and space and air balance differences. Here are three areas that they pointed out:
1. Multiple settings
In addition to operating rooms, surveyors are looking more closely at the peri-operative environments, such as central sterile processing, endoscope cleaning areas and patient prep areas.
2. Layout and space
Design requirements in places like the central instrument processing areas are being examined more carefully. Surgical instruments must be decontaminated in one room and sterilized and processed for reuse in another environmentally separate room. Sometimes work flow optimization can compromise required physical separations.
3. Air balance differences
To maintain proper environments, the air handling equipment must be operating differentially so that clean, filtered air is supplied under positive pressure to sterile areas, and air is purged under negative pressure in potentially contaminated spaces.
One of the most efficient ways to keep infection rates low and stay in compliance is to test and inspect for these new focus areas regularly. In advance of a Joint Commission survey, you can proactively identify any issues and resolve them.
Most hospitals experience the Joint Commission survey once every few years, but across ARAMARK Healthcare’s portfolio of more than 1,000 hospitals, my team told me that we participate in a regulatory or accreditation survey more than once per week!
It helps to work with a partner who knows how to carry the load, whether it is a load of wood, or the pressure of having surveyors in house.
