A Thanksgiving Message from Cor Catena
11/25/2019
As we approach Thanksgiving, I am especially grateful for the physicians, nurses and all our team members who work together to provide quality compassionate care for our patients and their families. The opportunity to care for friends, neighbors and community members is an honor. We exist for you, our patients, and our team continually strives to provide a positive experience for everyone in our care.
We have taken numerous steps to develop a culture of safety within our organization and have increased our efforts to communicate effectively with clinicians, patients and their families and the community we serve. Nearly seven years ago, we started a journey to become a highly reliable healthcare organization. Our belief was founded in the fact that highly reliable healthcare organizations who deliberately focus on studying and reducing errors ultimately achieve better clinical outcomes. Since embarking on this path, our hospital has reduced serious safety events by eighty-two percent.
Our focus on patient safety and high reliability includes starting every day with a safety huddle, a brief meeting in which opportunities to enhance patient safety are reviewed. Our safety culture supports continuous reinforcement of safe behaviors and error prevention tools for all employees and physicians throughout our organization.
This constant focus on quality and safety has led to improvements in sepsis care, catheter-associated urinary tract infections (CAUTIs), central line-associated bloodstream infections (CLASBIs) and care for patients with Clostridium difficile (C.diff). Our hospital now performs better than the national average in each of these areas. Our team of physicians, nurses and clinicians also has worked diligently to reduce surgical infection rates, resulting in our performance being in line with the national average.
Hospital leadership – administration, medical staff and board of trustees – is engaged to monitor progress and identify opportunities for continued improvement. We continue to make investments in technologies and adopt evidence-based practices that support safer care such as electronic health records, barcoding systems for medications and surgical sponges, and monitors to alert nursing staff of a potential fall.
While I am proud of our team for the progress we’ve made, there are opportunities for improvement, particularly in the area of patient experience. We are ensuring patients are rounded on regularly by their assigned nurse and nurse leader, and patients are being engaged in their care through bedside shift reports. We are implementing a new compassionate care model to enhance our ability to establish and maintain connected relationships with every patient.
Our work to enhance quality care and safety for our patients is ongoing. This Thanksgiving, I’m grateful for our team’s collective commitment to continuous quality improvement.
Cornelio Catena, CEO
Commonwealth Health Wilkes-Barre General Hospital
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