Cincinnati's
The Christ Hospital is joining 29 other hospitals across the nation in Phase III of the
Transforming Care at the Bedside Collaborative, a national effort aimed at improving hospital care for patients and employees.
The Bedside Collaborative was started in 2003 by the
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the
Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI). The collaborative draws on front-line hospital experience to transform the nature, and lower the costs, of health care delivery. The Christ Hospital will join others in focusing on four areas: safe and reliable care, vitality and teamwork, patient-centered care and value-added care processes.
Among the collaborative's specific goals are:
• reducing hospital-acquired pressure ulcers to zero
• reducing patient falls to one or less per 10,000 patient days
• increasing staff vitality and reduce annual voluntary turnover by 50 percent
• 95 percent of patients will definitely recommend the hospital
• increasing nurses’ time at the bedside to 60 percent or higher.
The 555-bed, non-profit hospital offers services in cardiovascular care, spine treatment, women's health, major surgery, cancer, behavioral medicine, orthopedics, emergency care, kidney transplant and others. The hospital also offers the Christ Hospital Medical Associates, a primary care physician practice with several office locations throughout Greater Cincinnati. The Christ Hospital's geriatrics unit will participate in the program starting this fall.
"During that time, employees will conduct a variety of research activities, explore innovations in care delivery and continuously measure outcomes. All findings will be reported back to the collaborative with the goal of building models other healthcare institutions can follow to redesign care to meet future healthcare demands," according to the hospital.
Here are a few examples for the collaborative of innovations created at other hospitals, from the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI)
web site:
• Skin integrity cards: At Kaiser Roseville, nurses' aides carry in their pockets a small card with drawings of the human body when they do bed baths. If they see reddened areas on a patient they circle that area on the card. The nurse validates the finding and flags it in the doctor’s progress notes. It's a simple idea that turned into a powerful tool to prevent pressure sores — a leading cause of delayed discharges.
• Patient self-medication: The UPMC Shadyside team experimented with self-medication giving patients the option of managing their own medications. Some patients found it empowering; others shied away. The clear lesson for the TCAB team, says Sue Martin, was the need for individualization: "Everyone is so different! We can’t make assumptions about what patients want."
• Revamped food services: UPMC Shadyside is winning praise for its TCAB project creating a redesigned, patient-centered, "liberalized" dietary program. They've loosened restrictions, opened up the menus, extended kitchen hours and started an evening snack service in which a hostess brings around a basket of granola bars, fruit and yogurt. The initiative has not only reduced food waste, it has improved patients' nutrition: they eat well because they get food they want.
Writer: Feoshia Henderson
Sources: Michael Beauchat, The Christ Hospital and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement
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