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National Patient Safety Goals (NPSGs) are a set of specific, high-priority safety requirements that The Joint Commission builds directly into its accreditation standards, organized by accreditation program and revised on a regular cycle. They are not a single universal list — a hospital, an ambulatory surgery center, and a behavioral health organization are evaluated against different NPSG content, because the safety priorities and applicable standards differ by care setting.
Page checked against Joint Commission source material in August 2026. This is the single fact about NPSGs most worth getting right in 2026 and the one generic summaries are most likely to get wrong: the Hospital and Critical Access Hospital accreditation programs no longer use the NPSG chapter at all as of January 1, 2026 — see below.
The 2026 Change: Hospital and Critical Access Hospital Programs Moved to National Performance Goals
Effective January 1, 2026, The Joint Commission replaced the National Patient Safety Goals chapter with a new National Performance Goals (NPGs) chapter for the Hospital and Critical Access Hospital accreditation programs. According to Joint Commission and industry reporting on the change, the NPG chapter consolidates existing requirements that “rise above regulation” into a smaller number of measurable, goal-level statements — reported as 14 goals in total — rather than introducing new substantive requirements. In other words, this is primarily a reorganization and renaming of existing expectations for these two programs, not a new set of obligations layered on top of what hospitals already had to do.
Goals identified in Joint Commission and secondary reporting on the 2026 Hospital NPG chapter include (this is a representative, not necessarily complete, subset — confirm the full current list against Joint Commission’s own standards page before using it for survey preparation):
- Goal 1 — the hospital ensures the correct patient receives the correct care at the correct time
- Goal 2 — the governing body and leadership team foster a culture of safety
- Goal 3 — the hospital has an emergency management program
- Goal 4 — the hospital prioritizes excellent health outcomes for all patients (health equity)
- Goal 5 — the hospital prioritizes infection prevention and control
- Goal 6 — the hospital prioritizes pain management and safe prescribing practices
- Goal 7 — the hospital respects the patient’s right to safe, informed care
- Goal 8 — the hospital reduces the risk for suicide
- Goal 12 — the hospital is staffed to meet the needs of the patients it serves, and staff are competent to provide safe, quality care (a new staffing-focused goal reported as effective January 2026)
Additional goals in the 14-goal chapter reportedly address transplant safety and waived (point-of-care) testing. For a patient-safety office preparing for survey, the practical implication is largely terminological but real: policy references, staff training materials, and internal audit tools written around “NPSG 1,” “NPSG 7,” and similar hospital-program citations need to be cross-walked to the new NPG numbering, since the underlying chapter has been renamed and renumbered even where the substance carried over.
Programs That Still Use National Patient Safety Goals in 2026
The NPSG-to-NPG rename applies specifically to the Hospital and Critical Access Hospital accreditation programs. Other Joint Commission accreditation and certification programs — including Ambulatory Health Care, Behavioral Health Care and Human Services, Home Care, Laboratory, Nursing Care Center, and Office-Based Surgery — continue to operate under the traditional National Patient Safety Goals chapter for 2026, each with its own program-specific goal content. A hospital-based patient safety officer whose institution also operates an accredited ambulatory clinic, a behavioral health unit, or a laboratory needs to track two different chapter structures simultaneously: NPGs for the hospital itself, and NPSGs for any other accredited program operating under the same organizational umbrella.
What NPSG/NPG Content Typically Covers
Across programs and revision cycles, National Patient Safety Goals have historically clustered around a recurring set of safety priorities, though the exact numbering, wording, and applicability shift from year to year and program to program: accurate patient identification before care, treatment, or a procedure; improving the effectiveness of communication among caregivers (including read-back protocols for verbal and telephone orders, and standardized handoff communication); safe medication use, including look-alike/sound-alike drug precautions and anticoagulant safety; clinical alarm system safety; healthcare-associated infection prevention, commonly anchored to hand-hygiene compliance; identifying patients at risk for suicide; and, for surgical and invasive-procedure settings, the Universal Protocol for preventing wrong-site, wrong-procedure, and wrong-person surgery. Do not treat this list as the current, authoritative content for any specific program — always confirm against that program’s current accreditation manual, since goals are added, retired, and renumbered on a regular cycle.
How NPSGs/NPGs Differ From Other Joint Commission Safety Requirements
NPSGs and NPGs sit inside the broader accreditation standards but are called out separately because they represent priority focus areas subject to concentrated survey attention, rather than the full body of applicable standards. They are distinct from, and operate alongside, the Sentinel Event Policy, which governs the specific review process triggered after a serious patient-safety event has already occurred, rather than the baseline preventive requirements NPSGs/NPGs establish. A hospital can be fully compliant with every applicable NPG and still experience a sentinel event; the two frameworks address prevention and post-event response respectively, and both matter to a comprehensive patient-safety program.
Practical Guidance for Tracking Compliance
Because both the content and the accreditation-program applicability of these goals change on a regular cycle, and because 2026 specifically introduced a structural rename for hospitals, a workable internal-tracking approach separates two things: (1) a program-by-program map of which chapter (NPG vs. NPSG) currently applies to each of your organization’s accredited services, refreshed at least annually; and (2) a goal-by-goal crosswalk from prior-year citations to current numbering, so training materials, audit checklists, and policy cross-references don’t silently point to a retired goal number. Relying on last year’s goal numbers without checking for a rename, a retirement, or a program-applicability change is one of the more common, avoidable survey-preparation gaps.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do hospitals still have National Patient Safety Goals in 2026?
Not under that name. Effective January 1, 2026, the Hospital and Critical Access Hospital programs use a renamed National Performance Goals (NPG) chapter instead. The underlying safety priorities are largely continuous with what NPSGs previously covered, but the chapter structure, numbering, and terminology changed.
Is this the same list for every accreditation program?
No. Goal content is set separately for each accreditation program (Hospital/CAH now under NPGs; Ambulatory, Behavioral Health, Home Care, Laboratory, Nursing Care Center, and Office-Based Surgery still under NPSGs for 2026), and each program’s list should be checked independently — do not assume a goal that applies to one program applies to another.
How often are these goals revised?
Joint Commission accreditation manuals, including the goal/NPG chapters, are updated on a recurring — typically annual, with mid-year updates possible — cycle. Always confirm you are working from the current effective version for your specific accreditation program rather than a prior year’s document.
Do NPSGs/NPGs apply to hospitals accredited by an organization other than The Joint Commission?
“National Patient Safety Goals” and “National Performance Goals” are Joint Commission-specific chapter names. CMS-recognized alternative accreditors (such as DNV or HFAP) maintain their own comparable patient-safety requirements, which are not guaranteed to mirror Joint Commission’s goal content, numbering, or terminology.
See the Patient Safety & Infection Prevention hub, and related coverage of sentinel events and Patient Safety Organization reporting and privilege.
