Inside Advocates

• 6/4/2009
• Author: Kristine Miller
• Category: EC News Blog
• 26520 Views
• 0 Comments
• 

EC engineers George Mills, Jerry Gervais, and John Maurer are always hard at work for you and your environment of care. I know, because every day, I watch them stride past my office, deep in discussion of some EC Standard interpretation, figuring out ways to make things better for the health care environment. Officially, they’re the engineering members of the Joint Commission’s “Standards Interpretation Group.”
 
You could call them your inside advocacy team.
 
Their latest efforts resulted in a successful clarification of the fire watch required by Life Safety Standard LS.01.02.01, EP 1—an issue they hammered out with other specialists in the field. “We know this has been a question in people’s minds,” says Mills, who’s the senior engineer in this group of EC experts. “It took pulling the team together, then making several phone calls to other strategic authorities to finalize the definition.”
 
The requirement is that organizations have a special fire watch any time a fire alarm system or sprinkler system is out of service for more than 4 hours in a 24-hour period. But what should you do during scheduled outages? And just what does “out of service” mean? For instance, if you put a shield over just one smoke detector during construction to keep the dust from triggering false fire alarms, is that enough to warrant a fire watch?
 
The clarification, to be published in the July issue of Environment of Care News®*, explains exactly when a fire watch is required and how to handle scheduled outages. It also defines the phrase “out of service” in a handy checklist. 
 
“This clarification will help make health care facilities more fire safe,” says Mills. “And it will streamline the fire watch process.”
 
In today’s complex world, streamlining sounds good. Inside advocacy at work! Let us know how we can be advocates for you.