Hospital highlights - Aug. 27, 2009

Top priority: patient safety

Whitman Hospital and Medical Centers’s top priorities are patient safety and quality of care. Members of our hospital team meet monthly to review progress on our many efforts to improve safety for you, our patients, and that ties very closely with improving our performance as an organization. What does this mean? How are we doing at WHMC when it comes to patient safety? The following are comments from an article written by our Chief Clinical Officer, Denise Dominik.

“We want our staff to be active partners in improving the safety for our patients, environment and processes as well as for our staff. Making mistakes is part of being human – however, most of our mistakes are easily corrected and cause no harm. What are some of our initiatives to make WHMC the safest place for you, our patients?

We have standardized the use of patient arm bands/alert bands to ensure we are doing the right thing for the right patient, focus on standardizing our emergency codes to be consistent with other Washington state hospitals; implementation of a rapid response team to quickly address patients with changes in their condition to prevent unnecessary codes; engaging staff on teams to drive improvements at the bedside; bedside report at change of shift; implementing safety technology such as bar-code medication verification at the bedside; as well as ensuring proper hand hygiene. Recently, hand hygiene’s importance has been elevated in protecting yourself against the Swine Flu (H1N1).”

Finally, as a reminder our clinicians cannot give medical advice out over the phone. It is simply that they cannot assess your condition without seeing you in person. This has been a trend nationwide in hospitals for the same reason. Our emergency department is open 24/7 just so we can be there for you.

Jon Davis,

administrator

Whitman Hospital & Medical Center