Hospitals have the Joint Commission on Accreditation on Hospital Organizations
; and there are many othes that certify other things: MAGNET certification , which means that the nurses are well-cared for, well-trained and well-equipped (inside tip: if nurse moral is bad – that’s not a hospital you want to be in.
NB: as of this writing, the JCAHO (Joint Commission) website is entirely down. Not even a 404 error.
So who sets standards for evaluating preparedness? Nobody. But, as the NIUSR has pointed out -last year, Reader’s Digest took a shot. From the NIUSR Blog:
Jamie Imus, writing on the NIUSR blog, makes this case:
How is Reader’s Digest qualified to measure the preparedness of our urban areas?
The answer is simple. They aren’t, but no one else was doing it, so they took it upon themselves.
This reveals three opportunities for NIUSR:
- Support RD for their initiative and recognition of the issues, and use this as an opportunity to critically review their work, offer our expertise, endorse the study (if appropriate) and potentially join them in this effort (they may want us to lead, as experts).
- RD is about to give this issue a spotlight and I think NIUSR should take advantage of that to talk about our “imperatives” and our progress, to date.
- Standards! What are they? Where are they? RD suggests that they don’t exist, so they did their best to come up with some. This is a gap that NIUSR needs to fill, until someone with more authority, expertise or resources wants to fill it.
Not only is this critical for the general public – and for professionals – but exceptionally important for the planners in citizen-response groups and NGO’s – especially those with less money – because accurately knowing weaknesses and strengths will make for better resource-allocation decisions.