From Vim & Vigor Fall 2012
Hospitals use best practices to improve safety for patients
How do you choose the best hospital for the care you need? One important way is to look into its track record on quality and safety. There are several national professional organizations that are committed to the improvement of the quality of care and the monitoring of outcomes for patients.
To ensure that they are following nationally recognized practices to deliver quality care, hospitals, including those of Community Healthcare System, voluntarily seek accreditations from these professional organizations.
Community Hospital, St. Catherine Hospital and St. Mary Medical Center use best practices and continually work to improve safety, prevent adverse events, monitor and improve performance, and meet or exceed patient expectations.
"The accreditation process involves self-assessment by the hospitals, as well as review by expert external surveyors who are also healthcare professionals," says Nancy Moser, vice president of Compliance, Quality and Risk Management for Community Healthcare System. "This self-assessment or evaluation process is completed by hospital staff before a certificate or gold seal is awarded and results in elevated levels of care and service," she says.
What to Look for as a Patient
Looking for the seal of accreditation can help you make an informed choice. Accreditation confirms that a hospital has undergone a thorough review of its policies and practices and delivers consistent, quality patient care.
One internationally recognized accrediting symbol in healthcare is the Joint Commission Gold Seal of Approval. Hospitals that have attained the gold seal, including Community Hospital in Munster, St. Catherine Hospital in East Chicago and St. Mary Medical Center in Hobart, have met the highest and most rigorous performance standards to obtain this distinction. Joint Commission accreditation does not begin and end with the on-site survey. It is a continual process. Each time a nurse rechecks a patient's ID badge before administering medication or every time surgical team members call "time out" to verify that they have the right patient, the right procedure and the right appendage or site, they're practicing quality standards.
"Because standards are regarded as the most rigorous in the industry, our hospitals choose to be evaluated by the Joint Commission and are therefore committed to providing the highest level of quality care to their patients," says John Gorski, chief operating officer of Community Healthcare System. "We are especially proud of the work our staff has done to be accredited and engaged in a process that promotes continuous and systematic improvements in our performance and outcomes of care."
Setting the Standard
The Joint Commission's standards are continuously updated to reflect the latest advances in medicine and healthcare. Hospital accreditation standards, about 250 of them, address a wide range of issues, from patient rights and education, infection control, medication management and adverse event prevention, to how a hospital verifies that its doctors, nurses and clinical staff are qualified and competent, as well as how it prepares for emergencies and how it collects data on performance and uses it to improve the hospital.
Other accreditations are granted by outside agencies for achievement of high practice standards relating to particular procedures, treatments and specific care areas, including the chest pain and stroke centers at the hospitals of Community Healthcare System.
The Best Care, Every Time
Community Hospital, St. Catherine Hospital and St. Mary Medical Center have become Accredited Chest Pain Centers through the Society of Chest Pain Centers. This distinction was earned through a rigorous evaluation of the hospitals' cardiac care services, practices, guidelines and treatment protocols during the first critical stages of heart attack.
Accredited Chest Pain Centers are designed to stabilize and treat heart attack patients immediately, when the chances of recovering are greatest. The goal is to provide the most urgent and direct care possible to minimize heart damage and enhance the patient's recovery.
In addition to finding quality heart attack care at the hospitals, the Stroke Centers of Excellence have earned the Gold Seal of Approval from the Joint Commission for Primary Stroke Centers. This means that the hospitals' stroke programs follow stringent national standards and guidelines that significantly improve outcomes for stroke patients. At each hospital, this specialized team of healthcare professionals works together to develop an individualized plan of care for every patient from admission through recovery and post-discharge.
Behind the scenes, Community Healthcare System laboratory services, which also have a significant impact on the patient experience, have received a systemwide accreditation from the Commission on Laboratory Accreditation of the College of American Pathologists (CAP).
Community Healthcare System's facilities are part of some 6,800 laboratories that have received CAP-accreditation nationwide. However, there are only about 100 integrated system laboratories across the United States that have earned this distinction.
"We strive to maintain the same high-quality results from one lab site to the next, so that every patient receives the best care possible- each and every visit," Gorski says.