The document discusses the importance of sustaining pet visitation programs in hospitals and ensuring they are compliant with regulatory standards. It notes that while such animal assisted activity programs have become common, few hospitals have systematic methods for ongoing evaluation and training of handler/dog teams. The document warns that compliance reviewers will scrutinize such programs to ensure proper documentation, screening, and supervision of visits. It emphasizes that due diligence requires supervised visits and documentation of clinical value to reduce liability risks and improve patient satisfaction. Hospitals are encouraged to develop policies for sustainable training and oversight of animal assisted activity programs.

1. What Are You Doing To Sustain Your Pet Visitation Program?
And Does JCAHO Care? (HINT: YES!)
Seeing a dog in a hospital used to turn heads. Today’s response to dogs in the
hospital is more likely to be a child’s face transforming from the stress of pain to a
knowing smile, a nod of the head and a quiet request to pet the dog. Or, it might be a
person with multiple educational degrees and training dressed in medical garb,
forgetting for a moment who and where she is, asking if she can pet the dog (and
ending up on her knees giving the dog a belly rub right in the middle of the unit’s
floor).
And while these Animal Assisted Activity (AAA) programs, as they’re technically
referred to, have become more the norm, few—if any—hospitals who’ve had a
program in place for more than a year, have a systematic method for ensuring their
handler/dog teams are continuing to provide competent, caring, and appropriate
visits to patients.
If you’re a hospital administrator, you know what it’s like to undergo a compliance
review. Once the reviewer finds one thing, he or she starts to dig in for the long
haul, questioning programs, policies and procedures that they might have otherwise
glossed over. This happened to one of my hospital clients recently. The reviewer
narrowed her focus on their AAA program after uncovering other hospital-wide
anomalies.
“Where do you keep your records on your handlers and dogs?” “ Do you chart or
track their patient visits?” “How often are they re-screened, re-evaluated or re-
oriented?” Do you have systems in place for regularly reviewing, screening,
shadowing, supervision, and re-training them?
This is just the tip of the iceberg of questions my client faced. But even without the
threat of a targeted compliance review, there are other reasons to proactively
maintain your AAA program, including:
1. Quality Control: It ensures your program is delivering continuously high-
quality, reliable evidence-based therapeutic value to your patients and their
families.
2. Safety Liability Reduction: A program with sustainable training procedures
reduces liability because teams are following infection control protocols,
patient privacy rules, and solid fundamentals of an AAA and AAT visit.
3. Improved Patient Satisfaction: Patient satisfaction can be linked to AAA
programs. (By the way, have you measured that?) Investing time and training
into your AAA program has immediate, tangible results in the critical area of
patient (and family and staff) satisfaction.

2. (Re) consider this: You are giving direct patient access to your dog/handler dog
visitation teams for visits that can last up to 15 minutes or longer. Wouldn’t due
diligence suggest that these visits be supervised to ensure they are appropriate,
effective, and translated into some documented clinical value?
Animal Assisted Activity programs (and their emerging first cousin, Animal Assisted
Therapy) are still new elements in an array of integrated healthcare offerings.
These high-value, low cost programs deliver huge upside potential by providing
clinical and emotional healing to patients, families, and staff alike. As these
programs begin to mature, it’s critical that hospitals have the policies in place to
implement sustainable efforts to ensure they remain effective and deliver the
healing properties they so effectively offer to all.
Terri Moss has been involved in the field of AAA since 1996, when she started visiting
hospitalized children with her therapy dog, Cody. She has been on the Board and
served as an evaluator of therapy pet teams for the nonprofit, Therapy Pets, and works
with hospitals and health systems to implement and sustain these valuable programs
through policy development and training, screening and supervising handler/dog
teams for her hospital clients.
Terri speaks to healthcare professional associations and hospitals about Animal
Assisted Therapy and Animal Assisted Activity programs and “Rounds with Dogs” at
California hospitals who want to offer stress relief to their staff. You may learn more
about Terri’s work and contact her through her website:
www.healingwithpawsaat.com