At least three Northern California hospitals have plans to open meditation rooms — or to expand and update what were once known as chapels — for nondenominational observance. This is in response to the changing needs of hospital staff and the evolving view that the body and soul can heal together. These new meditation rooms do not have pews or religious symbols. Instead they are sanctuaries where families can pray for patients, space for prayer rugs and windows facing east, or a quiet area where doctors can pause for spiritual refreshing. According to a chaplain who manages spiritual care for Kaiser North Valley hospitals “When people are facing the ultimate spiritual and existential crisis, such as illness, they need a quiet place to go. These rooms should meet the needs of all faiths.” Some hospitals do not call the rooms chapels because that label invokes the Judeo-Christian tradition. Hospitals have staff from a wide variety of faith backgrounds including Muslims who need a place to pray five times a day.
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More Hospitals Are Renovating to Accommodate the Obese
Novation, a medical supply contracting company, has released its 2010 Bariatric Report, a nationwide survey of about 300 VHA Inc. and University Health System Consortium member hospitals, confirming that the obesity epidemic poses new and significant challenges to U.S. hospitals. According to this survey, over 48 percent of the respondents saw an increase in admissions of morbidly obese patients since 2008 while 13 percent saw a significant increase. Moreover, 28 percent of the respondent hospitals reported having invested in physical renovations of their facilities last year to accommodate the morbidly obese with another 8 percent saying that they planned to do so. Novation reports that hospitals have been buying specialized medical equipment such as bariatric blood pressure cuffs, bariatric beds and mattresses, stretchers, operating room tables, and non-clinical furniture. While the industry has seen an overall decrease in spending on renovations and building improvements due to the still recovering economy, physical renovations to accommodate bariatric patients have increased — such as widening door openings, installing higher-load steel toilets, providing open showers, and purchasing new seating for patients and family members.
Incorporating the Parking Garage Into Disaster Planning
The cars, minivans and sports-utility vehicles began lining up and slowly moving forward, just as they would at a busy fast food drive-thru. But there weren’t any burgers or fries on the menu. Instead, drivers and passengers were examined by a team of Stanford doctors and nurses, all without getting out of their cars. In what is believed to be the first training exercise in the country, a team of healthcare professionals at Stanford Hospital and Clinics turned the first floor of a parking garage into a drive-through emergency room in hopes of creating a more efficient way to treat a large number of patients during an influenza pandemic or other emergency. The hospital’s medical director for disaster planning believes that drive-through triage can serve as a blueprint for hospitals nationwide and across the globe. During the flu season, emergency departments are bursting at the seams as people with limited health insurance use the emergency department as their primary care physician. According to Dr. Eric Weiss, medical director of disaster planning at Stanford Hospital and Clinics and Lucille Packard Children’s Hospital: “We have to have a new mechanism to take care of large numbers of patients during a pandemic and I think that this is going to be it.”
USP 797 Impacts Pharmacy Space and Design
This post has been replaced with a new post Understanding the Impact of USP 800 on Pharmacies that addresses the compounding of hazardous drugs as well as the updated USP 797.
USP 797 is a regulation that governs any pharmacy that compounds sterile preparations including centralized and satellite hospital-based pharmacies, outpatient pharmacies, and off-site pharmacies. USP 797 is designed to cut down on infections transmitted to patients through pharmaceutical products and to better protect staff working in pharmacies in the course of their exposure to pharmaceuticals. Issued by U.S. Pharmacopeia (USP), USP 797 has been endorsed by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) who expects that organization will be in full compliance by January 2008.