Assess staff competency for Joint Commission
Assess staff competency for Joint Commission
Two quick tricks to preparation
A new hire comes into your office. You ask her about her experience with various kinds of equipment and procedures. To each of your questions, she says yes, she has done that, she has worked with that, she knows how to do that. You mark her answers on a piece of paper.
In the past, that check mark was enough to prove to the Joint Commission that you assessed the employee’s competence upon hire. Not so anymore. The surveyor is likely to require some sort of proof that your staff have the knowledge they say they do. While some of that can be proven through documentation of labs and through supervisory observation at regular intervals, there are some cases when that information will not be readily available. What will you do?
"One possibility is to obtain recent, previous competencies from another hospital or home health agency where the person worked," suggests Judith Walden, BSN, MBA, administrator and chief executive officer of Kokua Nurses in Honolulu. "Or you can ask the applicant to produce evidence of their experience. I think the Joint Commission would accept that."
Nanette Johnson, RN, CRNI, director of Olsten Health Care in Denver, says she has a three-column chart that new hires and their supervisors fill out. The first column has the employee rate his or her experience on specific skills at A, B, C, or D, with A being no experience and D being able to teach. The second column is for the person to check off when they have read the company policy. The third column is left for the supervisor, who checks off each skill only after seeing the employee perform that skill.
"It can take two or three months to check all the skills out," says Johnson. "But then we know they have done it."
Walden says it will be the end of the year before it becomes clear just what is acceptable to the Joint Commission. "We have to see what happens when people start going through their surveys," she says. "We won’t really know what to do until then."
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