Review of 2016 National Patient Safety Goal: “Time-out”

In wound care, clinical and operational rules help maintain compliance with standards, and checklists can provide an audit tool to ensure that requirements have been followed. One example of using a checklist to help maintain compliance in the hospital involves a time-out, which is one of The Joint Commission’s 2016 National Patient Safety Goals. Defined under UP.01.03.01, a time-out is performed before a procedure to verify the procedure, patient, and site. To comply with this standard, one must customize the hospital’s policy and procedure, create a checklist for team members to follow, and institute and verify the checklist according to facility requirements. For example, when reviewing the Elements of Performance for UP.01.03.01 as documented by The Joint Commission, the following checklist could be used to ensure clinical and operational accuracy in this standard. Note that the hospital determines the amount and type of documentation required.

Read the rest of this article in Advances in Skin & Wound Care.

An excerpt from an article originally published in Advances in Skin & Wound Care, written by Cathy Thomas Hess, BSN, RN, CWCN, VP and Chief Clinical Officer for Wound Care at Net Health.