Four San Diego hospitals were recognized by Healthgrades, a company that provides information about hospitals, for public safety.
Alvarado Hospital, Paradise Valley Hospital, Sharp Chula Vista and UCSD Medical Center are equally or more likely to have superior results in specialty areas according to Healthgrades.
Paradise Valley and Alvarado were named among the top 5% of hospitals in the nation for patient safety in 2016 and received Healthgrades’ Patient Safety Excellence Award.
The designation recognizes superior performance in hospitals that have prevented serious and potentially avoidable complications for patients during hospital stays in areas such as spinal surgery, orthopedics and pulmonary care.
“At Alvarado Hospital, we have daily multi-disciplinary team huddles which include case managers, nursing staff, speech therapists, physical therapists, dieticians, physicians and more to optimize communication among health care professionals,” said Robin Gomez, Alvarado Hospital administrator. “These huddles improve patient safety, provide situational awareness of at-risk patients, and promote collaboration in real-time.”
This is the third year in a row Paradise Valley has been recognized and the second year for Alvarado. Both hospitals are part of Prime Healthcare Services, which has more 2016 Patient Safety Excellence Award recipients than any other health system in the country. All 15 of its California-based hospitals were recognized.
“The recipients of the Healthgrades 2016 Patient Safety Excellence Award have not only found ways to reduce patient safety events, but to outperform expectations in prevention of safety incidents,” said Evan Marks, chief strategy officer, Healthgrades. “We applaud these hospitals for their performance and for their organizational commitment to delivering high quality care.”
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Healthgrades said if all hospitals performed similarly to Patient Safety Excellence Award recipients 270,457 patient safety events, on average, could have been avoided.
“Patient safety is maintained by monitoring closely patient outcomes and standards of practice for all clinical staff,” said Neerav Jadeja, Paradise Valley Hospital administrator. “Our patients’ safety is reinforced and sustained through required education and training provided to all clinical staff at least twice annually. The medical staff also is engaged in reviewing all patient safety indicators. The review process allows an opportunity to learn how to continually improve care.”
In total, Healthgrades recognized 466 hospitals nationwide.
