State exploring licensing hospitals

Ohio is the only state that doesn’t license its hospitals, prompting the Ohio Nurses Association and some lawmakers to call for increased regulation (Source: “State examining ways to increase hospital regulation after patient overdose deaths at Columbus facility,” Akron Beacon Journal, April 17, 2019).

Others say there’s already enough state oversight and warn that adding more could take away from patient care.

Concerned that Ohio is the only state in the nation that does not license general hospitals, the governor and state director of public health are looking at ways to increase regulation at such facilities.

Their interest comes with the revelation that two central Ohio hospitals lacked policies to prevent staff members from bypassing alerts and approval systems to access and administer inappropriately high or fatal amounts of painkillers to patients.

“It makes absolutely no sense that Ohio is the only state that does not license hospitals,” DeWine told The Dispatch last week. “We owe this to the citizens in the state of Ohio to be able to look at a situation and say ‘Look, what have we learned from this tragedy?’”