Special Alert: JCAHO Impostors - JCAHO official suspects terrorists are at work
| Special Alert: JCAHO Impostors |
JCAHO official suspects terrorists are at work
The impostors visiting hospitals must be taken very seriously, says Joe Cappiello, vice president for accreditation field operations with the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations. “It would not surprise me, I would not be stunned, if the FBI found something out and they came back and say it was a terrorist group looking at health care,” Cappiello says. “If the intent of terrorism is to undermine the confidence of people in their government to keep them safe, what better place to go than health care?”
In addition to targeting health care facilities for the effect on the community, Cappiello notes that hospitals contain materials of interest to terrorists.
“There may not be a lot of radiological material, but there’s enough for someone interested in making a dirty bomb. And God knows what pathogens are being researched on in some of our university-based medical centers,” he says. “So there are a variety of reasons that a group like that might be interested in health care centers.”
Like others monitoring the impostors, Cappiello says his assessment would have been different before 9/11. Back then, he would have assumed the visitors were planning a theft of drugs or other valuables, he says. But not now. “We can’t pooh-pooh these kinds of events,” he says. “If someone is trying to impersonate Joint Commission surveyors, you need to try to detain them in some way, call the authorities, follow them out and try to get a license number of the car they drive away in. Something we can follow up on.”
The impostors visiting hospitals must be taken very seriously, says the vice president for accreditation field operations with the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations.
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