West Valley Medical Center - October 01, 2019

Dave Calley

Crush the Crisis

West Valley partnered with the Caldwell PD to host the first annual medication take-back day on September 7th. The goal was to help remove any unnecessary medications from the home that might be used incorrectly. Especially any opioid medications. West Valley was one of 65 HCA facilities throughout the country to participate in this event. During the hours of 10am-1pm, Caldwell PD and our volunteers received approximately 65 pounds of discarded meds. Many community members who stopped by to discard their medications said they really appreciated the event! West Valley plans to participate in this event every year.

Crush the Crisis event

Medication safety performance

The World Health Organization (WHO) reported there is a 1 in 300 chance of patient harm during health care and that health care errors are the 14th leading cause of morbidity and mortality in the world.

HCA and West Valley takes medication safety seriously. Both West Valley and Eastern Idaho Regional Medical Center were the first hospitals in Idaho to implement barcode scanning of all medications. This occurred in 2002 (yes, I’m that old to remember). That technology continues to improve and yet we have found that there are ways to circumvent the system. We now have multiple safety features to make sure medications are properly administered.

We look at 5 separate safety measures to gauge our compliance:

  1. Medication barcode scanning in the ED including emergent procedures. Goal is >95% barcode scanning.
  2. Overall hospital barcode medication scanning. Goal is > 98%
  3. Pyxis Override Transactions. Making sure all new med orders are reviewed and verified by a pharmacist. Goal is < 1% of all medication overridden from Pyxis and administered without pharmacy verification. (ED excluded).
  4. IV Infusion pump guardrail compliance. The IV pumps have “smart” technology to guide appropriate set-up and administration. Goal is to use these guardrails > 90% of the time on all IV medications. Including plain NS bags.
  5. File time variance. To make sure nurses are scanning medications before administration and not after the fact. Goal is > 99.5% scanning prior to administration.

West Valley continues to be in the 5 star category rating. Much effort behind the scenes has contributed to the success. Our overall goal isn’t just to be safe on paper. We definitely consider each patient’s safety in our hospital as our most important priority. However it is nice to quantify some of the efforts that are employed and celebrate our successes.

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