New standards coming for disaster volunteers
New standards coming for disaster volunteers
Standards expected to be finalized by year end
Has your organization ever had volunteers offer help during a disaster but was unable to utilize the extra manpower because credentials could not be verified?
In 2002, the Joint Commission created new standards to address privileges for licensed independent practitioners who offered help during disasters, but it became clear they weren’t broad enough, says Robert Wise, MD, JCAHO’s vice president of the division of standards and survey methods. "We realized we needed to create [this] type of disaster privileges for other licensed practitioners. Nurses are a critical group to keep a hospital running during a disaster."
To address this, the JCAHO has proposed new standards for volunteers during disasters, which would cover other practitioners. The standards will undergo committee review this fall and are expected to be finalized by the end of the year.
"After 9/11, it became very clear that a community or hospital that was hit pretty hard by a disaster might not have enough doctors or licensed practitioners to deal with the kind of casualties they were seeing," says Wise.
In New York City, there was an influx of doctors from all over the country, but they lacked proper credentials and privileges, and the process required can take months. "So we understood that there needed to be some change to allow rapid access to these professionals, but at the same time keeping the risk of loss of quality to a minimum," says Wise.
The new standards will allow for a more streamlined process for volunteer clinicians if two conditions are met: That the emergency management plan is activated and that there are patient needs that the organization is unable to meet.
During Katrina, since a disaster was declared for both Mississippi and Louisiana, organizations could use physicians from anywhere in the country as long as they had a license, Wise adds.
The Louisiana medical board’s database was not available to check credentials of volunteer physicians. "But they assigned primary source verification to the Federation of State Medical Boards, which is something we accept in our standards," says Wise. "So if somebody wanted to look for a Louisiana license, they were able to use that database."
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