Abstract
Like the 1995 JCAHO Standards for hospitals, the Accreditation Manual for Home Care (AMHC) emphasizes nutrition.
The JCAHO is focusing accreditation on the actual performance of governance, managerial, clinical, and support functions within organizations that directly and significantly affect the quality of patient care. This Agenda for Change consists of three sets of interlinked initiatives: reformulation of JCAHO standards, redesign of the survey process, and development of performance measures that will lead to the use of an interactive indicator data base. The reformulation of the standards is initially being achieved through reorganization of the AMHC into chapters that represent "important functions"—those that influence patient care outcomes the most.
The 1995 AMHC consists of two sections, with chapters related to direct (Section 1) and indirect (Section 2) care. Each chapter has a preamble that includes goals and essential processes that make up the function. The standards are accompanied by expanded intent and scoring guidelines to provide a clearer picture of how to comply. The intent statement and scoring guidelines for these standards relate to each type of service being provided. Further, how-to examples are being used more extensively in the scoring guidelines. Thus the AMHC appears considerably different from previous editions.
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