WSHA awarded Columbia County Health System and Ocean Beach Hospital & Medical Clinics with our annual Rural Quality Everyday Extraordinary Award at the Rural Hospital Leadership Conference in Chelan this June. We also recognized 13 hospitals from across the state for participating in our Critical Access Hospital Achievement of Quality Excellence Program.
We honored Dayton’s Columbia County Health System for its innovative approach to improving patient care through its Palliative Care Program. Its Palliative Care team sought to improve the quality of life for their patients living with serious illness. Program leaders set goals to reduce emergency department utilization, support end-of-life planning decisions and address spiritual care needs. The resulting program facilitated patient autonomy, access to information and choice. Program data showed a reduction in emergency department utilization for patients in the program and facilitated documentation of care goals and wishes. Patients and their families gave high praise to the program.
We honored Ocean Beach Hospital & Medical Clinics for its use of population data to identify diabetes as a significant and undertreated condition in its community. The hospital launched a quality improvement project designed to increase patient engagement in diabetes-related services in late 2022. The resulting program included improved clinic process flows to ensure that patients were referred to diabetes self-management education. Data showed that more patients enrolled in the diabetes education program in the first quarter of 2023 than in all of 2022.
The 13 hospitals participating in our Critical Access Hospital Achievement of Quality Excellence Program worked on quality improvement projects and submitted data on up to 14 quality improvement measures. These measures included antibiotic stewardship, reducing diagnostic errors, preventing patient falls and working to address social determinants of health.
These hospitals are:
- Arbor Health (Morton)
- Astria Sunnyside Hospital (Sunnyside)
- Columbia Basin Hospital (Ephrata)
- East Adams Rural Healthcare (Ritzville)
- Lincoln Hospital (Davenport)
- Lourdes Medical Center (Pasco)
- North Valley Hospital (Tonasket)
- Ocean Beach Hospital & Medical Clinics (Ilwaco)
- Providence Mount Carmel Hospital (Colville)
- Providence St. Joseph’s Hospital (Chewelah)
- St. Elizabeth Hospital (Enumclaw)
- Summit Pacific Medical Center (Elma)
- Willapa Harbor Hospital (South Bend)
Congratulations to all these hospitals for their continued work fostering outstanding care in their communities!
Darcy Jaffe
WSHA Senior VP of Safety and Quality
darcyj@wsha.org
