As announced in the September issue of The Source, Patient Safety Systems (PS) is a new chapter, but it does not contain any new standards.  Instead, the PS chapter pulls together 34 existing standards from 6 chapters (i.e., HR, LD, PI, MM, MS, RI) “to provide health care organizations with a proactive approach to designing or re-designing a patient-centered system that aims to improve quality of care and patient safety” into a truly integrated patient safety system. For now, the new chapter will only be included in the manual for hospitals, as this is the setting TJC believes is most at risk for “serious harm affecting more seriously ill patients”.   The chapter contains 30 pages, but you might start with the summary of the 34 standards as provided in the the Appendix on pages 20-24.
Tip 1: 11 of the 34 standards referenced above are from the leadership chapter alone.  Leaders should definitely review the new chapter and particularly note the growing emphasis on proactive risk assessment (Pages 14-15) and the concept of Patient Activation (Pg 17).
Tip 2: Organizations should expect that TJC is considering these 34 standards to be the core/foundation of an integrated patient safety system.  As such, hospitals should begin PS mock tracers in anticipation of  increased surveyor attention and rigor regarding these standards.
• See also the comments section of this article to download a copy of the chapter; for more insight into future directions on this topic and a link to the earlier referenced article.