As part of its new Accreditation 360 survey approach, Joint Commission is shifting emphasis toward competency-based education and data-driven skill development, particularly in areas tied to workforce readiness and patient safety. This shift is taking formal shape through new National Performance Goals™ (NPGs). Joint Commission is an independent nonprofit that accredits healthcare organizations and sets standards for quality and patient safety.
On January 1, 2026, Joint Commission announced that its new National Performance Goals (NPGs) will replace the old National Patient Safety Goals® (NPSGs),1 moving beyond basic compliance to a focus on actual patient safety results and integrating regulatory and quality standards into a clearer framework for hospitals and critical access hospitals.
These new NPGs are organized into 14 measurable topics with clearly defined goals. They formalize expectations around demonstrated competence, elevating mental health awareness and workforce readiness as measurable accreditation priorities. According to Joint Commission, these new requirements bring “a sharper focus to pressing issues in healthcare,” including mental health awareness, trauma-informed approaches, and compassionate communication.2 Training programs that address these areas will now support both accreditation goals and workforce sustainability.
The move from prescriptive requirements to NPGs signals that healthcare organizations will need to change their perspective from whether their staff has completed training to how staff perform, especially in high-risk areas like behavioral health and suicide risk. Workforce development programs must become part of the organization’s patient safety strategy by supporting real-world decision-making, not just knowledge, and by ensuring that the training is reinforced over time.
“The new NPGs demonstrate that healthcare systems will need to prioritize mental health for patients and team members. We are proud to offer a program that equips organizations with the tools and training to better support their workforce and ultimately improve patient care,” says April Neumann, executive vice president of Workforce Transformation at Vocate Education Solutions. “Hearing the positive feedback so far has been very meaningful.”
“We are proud to offer a program that equips organizations with the tools and training to better support their workforce and ultimately improve patient care.”
Nasium Training partners with hospitals and other healthcare organizations to offer solutions for workforce development and retention that focus on flexible learning paths. When it comes to complying with new Joint Commission expectations, Nasium Training can support healthcare organizations by helping staff demonstrate competence in key mental health-related areas.
Nasium Training offers a Mental Health Foundations for Healthcare Professionals that combines evidence-based content with applied learning that mirrors real clinical environments. According to Etta Rahming, one of Nasium Training’s training specialists, the course helps learners articulate and strengthen skills they may already be using instinctively, while also sharpening their ability to apply those skills consistently. “The course helps them sharpen their skills and it highlights what they already know, but don’t have the words for,” Rahming explains. “They learn how to recognize risk earlier and how to respond more clearly and effectively.”
The eight-week course is built around realistic scenarios, guided discussion, and live simulations, with learners working through situations involving suicide risk, abuse, de-escalation, and trauma-informed communication. They often work in small groups, then reconvene to compare approaches and outcomes. “It isn’t just teaching,” Rahming says. “They actually do the work. They developed plans for how to handle situations, and a self-care plan they can take with them after the course.”
“It isn’t just teaching. They actually do the work.”
Former instructor Elizabeth Minton notes that this applied approach is particularly important for healthcare professionals who interact closely with patients, but who may not have had formal mental health training. “Many of the learners are medical assistants or aides, people who interface with patients every day,” Minton says. “The course helps them recognize when behavior might signal something deeper, rather than just assuming anger or noncompliance.”
The curriculum incorporates vignettes, video simulations, and role play that demonstrate how mental health conditions can evolve over time. This helps learners identify visual, verbal, and behavioral cues that may indicate escalating risk. “The students learn to look beyond what someone is saying to how they’re presenting, how that presentation changes, and what those changes might mean,” Rahming explains.
Just as important, the Nasium Training course addresses the mental health of healthcare workers themselves. Instructors emphasize boundary setting, self-awareness, and strategies for managing emotional fatigue, a growing concern as burnout continues to affect safety, retention, and quality of care. “If you want your workers to last, you have to help them take care of themselves,” Rahming says. “That’s not always emphasized, but it should be.”
By combining structured content with hands-on application, the Mental Health Foundations course helps healthcare organizations move closer to what Joint Commission now expects: staff who can demonstrate how they apply mental health awareness and risk recognition in real situations, not just document that training occurred.
The course aligns with the new Joint Commission requirements by:
When a healthcare organization prepares for a Joint Commission survey or daily operations, they need to know if their staff can demonstrate competency in applying those practices in real interactions. Training like the Mental Health Foundations course can support organizations as they work to meet Joint Commission expectations around mental health awareness and risk reduction.
These applied training elements directly support the mental health priorities now embedded in Joint Commission’s National Performance Goals.
Today, the need for skills and competencies to address patients with mental health risks extends across a range of healthcare settings, including emergency departments, med-surg units, outpatient settings, and transitions of care. According to the CDC, for example, as of November 2025, 5,123 out of every 100,000 ED visits were mental health related.3
Among the new goals, two stand out for their direct relevance to mental health safety and workforce well-being.
NPG 8 is a direct mental health safety measure designed to support improving mental health awareness to help prevent harm in vulnerable patients. It supports mental health awareness by requiring:
Importantly, NPG 8 applies across care settings, not only in behavioral health environments. This new goal is designed to ensure that healthcare organizations make the identification and management of suicide risk a high-priority and measurable topic. Joint Commission considers training in suicide risk prevention to be essential, to ensure that healthcare providers can conduct thorough assessments and implement appropriate evidence-based interventions to reduce harm and manage risk effectively.
“Hospital suicide-risk policies should include training and competence assessment for staff caring for patients at risk.”
Joint Commission recognizes that burnout and mental health issues also pose critical safety challenges for healthcare staff. The new NPGs encourage leadership to create supportive environments with interventions like mindfulness training, measuring well-being, and involving staff in decision making to combat factors that drive burnout.
NPG 12 focuses on Health Professional Resource Management. It links staffing to patient safety and quality by requiring hospitals to have the right staffing mix, adequate coverage, and manageable workloads. The focus is root cause, tackling understaffing, poor team design, and excessive administrative loads to reduce stress and other factors contributing to burnout. Workforce development programs play a critical role in supporting NPG 12 by helping staff build resilience, communication skills, and coping strategies that mitigate burnout even when operational pressures persist.5
These new NPGs elevate the importance of mental health safety beyond minimum regulations and align with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) requirements.6
The table below illustrates how common healthcare scenarios map directly to competencies developed in the Mental Health Foundations course — and to Joint Commission Performance Goal expectations. See how each course element solves a specific care or safety scenario.
Nasium Training goes beyond generic training. The eight-week duration and depth of the course is more extensive than the more common one-off module. It includes applied scenarios and assessment, with focus on both patient-facing and staff-facing competence.
Contact us to learn more about the Nasium Training mental health training program or to discuss how we can help you customize it to meet the needs of your workforce.
1 Joint Commission. National Performance Goals Overview, 2026. https://www.jointcommission.org/en-us/standards/national-patient-safety-goals
2 Joint Commission. National Performance Goals (NPGs). https://www.jointcommission.org/en-us/standards/national-performance-goals
3 U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Mental Health-Related Emergency Department Visits. https://www.cdc.gov/mental-health/about-data/emergency-department-visits.html?utm
4 Joint Commission. National Performance Goal #8: Reducing the Risk for Suicide. https://www.jointcommission.org/en-us/standards/national-performance-goals/reducing-the-risk-for-suicide
5 Joint Commission. National Performance Goal #12: Health Professional Resource Management. https://www.jointcommission.org/en-us/standards/national-performance-goals/health-professional-resource-management
6 CMS Conditions of Participation related to quality and patient safety.
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