MCAL Member Update on Rule Changes and Recent BFS Citations

Here are three items I want to bring to your attention:

• HFA rule changes regarding medication errors or Incident reporting have not yet gone into effect. We are still waiting on mandatory legislative session days for the process to be completed. This is not easy in an election season. So the HFA rule changes are unlikely to happen until later this year.
• AFC rules changes are still in the planning stages, so we will not see action on these until 2023.
• Some HFA homes that have recently experienced their Bureau of Fire Services (BFS) inspection as a part of their license renewal cycle have received citations for having hard locking egress doors on non-memory care parts of the HFA. According to life safety code chapter 18 for new construction and chapter 19 for existing health care facilities (HFA included as an HCF), egress doors cannot be hard locked (requiring a key or other tool from the egress side) restricting a person from exiting. Instead, a 15 second delayed (no longer than 15 seconds) egress door may be used. However, hard locked doors may be permissible where clinical support exists. MCAL, along with other associations, have begun meeting with the Bureau of Fire Services to develop guidance on this topic. We’ll bring you more information as it becomes available.