Joint Commission

No, Joint Commission is not the Marijuana Cigarette Council or the Orthopedic Committee for Range of Motion. Joint Commission is the new and abbreviated moniker for JCAHO, the Joint Commission for the Accreditation of Health Care Organizations. And what an auspicious group!

Utah Phillips used to talk about how stupid it was that U.S. citizens pay taxes so the Forest Service can protect federal lands, our lands, but instead, the Forest Service builds roads and sells logging rights to timber companies at a net loss, only to have the companies cut down trees, ruin the environment, and then sell wood and paper products back to U.S. citizens at a profit! As Utah says, "That's dumb!"

Get this.

Joint Commission is a private, for-profit organization to which the government entrusts the creation of "standards" for health care organizations, organizations which, in turn, pay Joint Commission to evaluate their facilities to see if they meet these standards. Often they don't, so they have to be re-evaluated at an even greater expense, or sometimes pay fines. The federal government supports this inanity (health care corporate socialism) by attaching an organization's Medicare and Medicaid funding to successful meeting of the standards.

That's dumb!

First of all, the only way Joint Commission can continue to profit is to constantly come up with new standards, standards that organizations have to try to meet, and then (again) pay Joint Commission to evaluate their performance. Some standards border on the ridiculous.

Second, no one asks, why should the American health care consumer subject their safety and health to an organization who's purpose it is to profit off of the imposition of standards they've created in order to make money? That's like drivers putting their lives in the hands of an automobile maker whose first priority is to sell cars and make money. Anyone heard of the Pinto?

Third, and the point that should be most egregious to every nurse, is that many of the standards the Joint Commission comes up with amount to "dumbing down" the nursing profession. The aforementioned removal of the abbreviation for morphine is a classic example.

Joint Commission decided that the accurate and time-worn abbreviation MS was confusing. The commission believed that incidents in which nurses confused the abbreviation for Magnesium Sulfate, rather than Morphine Sulfate, had resulted in serious threats to patient safety. Regardless of whether or not this is true, the question remains, how best to deal with this.

Like a totalitarian government, the commission simply said, okay, don't allow health care workers to use the abbreviation; make them spell out morphine or magnesium. Forget education, forget training. Bring in big brother!

But seriously, not knowing whether to give a patient morphine or magnesium is not a matter of a confusing abbreviation. It is a matter of bad nursing. Morphine is given for pain; magnesium sulfate is given to slow down labor. If you don't know whether you're working in OB or emergency, you probably shouldn't be taking care of that patient!

I think there is a reason that Joint Commission's abbreviation is "JC". Its widespread acceptance in the medical-industrial-complex gives it the illusion that it is omnipotent, godly. In fact, it seems to me its just a bunch of profiteers getting rich.

Are we safer?