Quality & Accreditation Update
Renee DeHaas
Director of Patient Safety
Congratulations to all of you for your efforts in elevating the level of care we provide our patients here at West Valley Medical Center. In both the first and second quarter of 2018, West Valley ranked #2 in all of HCA for Clinical Excellence, which is a matrix of nationally reported quality indicators, infection prevention statistics and improvement measures. West Valley also ranked #1 in HCA during this time period for Surgical Site Infection Prevention! This is a huge accomplishment and reflects the commitment to our patients that you exhibit through your passion and practice every day with every patient. Our focused improvement areas remain with Sepsis, Readmission Rates and Core Measures. Part of that focus now includes requests for your feedback relating to any quality measures we do not meet. Our hope is that we are able to learn from each other and identify successful improvement efforts driven by you, our providers.
The quality of care and the safety of our environment we provide for our patients and staff will be getting an extra lift in August as we welcome The Joint Commission (TJC) on Monday August 6 and Tuesday, August 7. With the change in survey practices born from TJC’s SAFER Matrix, we request this intracycle improvement survey, which will allow surveyors to identify best practices and areas of opportunity we can focus on before our triennial TJC accreditation survey due in 2019. This two-day survey will include general focus on accreditation hot-button topics such as infection prevention, environment of care, appropriate assessment and documentation, and life safety. We will also be able to direct surveyors to areas where we feel we could use extra scrutiny and assessment for a successful survey experience in 2019. We encourage you to be a part of the survey process if surveyors are in your area, as they often have innovative best practice examples from recently surveyed hospitals.
Thank you for all that you do for our patients, staff and community. We appreciate your efforts in our ongoing quality process improvements and exemplary patient care. If you have any questions about our quality indicators or our accreditation, practices please email Renee DeHaas.