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10. Battery backup? "One fire marshal said we were great.
The next one gave us several dings that ended up costing us $9,000
in parts and labor and didn't improve safety," bemoans another facil-
ity boss. "All of our exit signs had battery backup capability, but
they were attached to a generator, so I disabled the batteries. That
meant we couldn't test them (and, admittedly, it probably destroyed
the warranty). We were told we had to order all new signs that didn't
have battery capability. When the new signs arrived, they were
exactly the same, but with a blank where the battery test button had
been in the old units. The only difference was that these were manu-
factured to work without batteries, so the warranty and UL approval
were still technically in effect."
11. Hot pastry. One facility got dinged for not having a policy on
warming up Danish in the microwave. "For 10 years we'd offered our
patients coffee, juice, water or soda in PACU along with cookies,
crackers or Danish, which we kept refrigerated," says the administra-
tor. "The staff would warm the Danish for a
few seconds in the microwave to
take the chill off before serv-
ing it. But we didn't have a
policy stating how long to
heat them in the
microwave, nor did we
test them to make sure
there were no hot spots that
might scald the mouth.
Instead of trying to write a poli-
cy, we decided to just get
rid of the Danish. Our food
A C C R E D I T A T I O N
BIG TROUBLE Sure, this Danish looks innocent enough …
