The nurses at Swedish Covenant Hospital strive to give you excellent quality health care that just keeps getting better. It's important to us to provide you with constantly improving health care as technology changes, new products are available, and we learn from our own experience. We want to minimize risk, improve your comfort, and help you live the healthiest life possible.
The measurement and improvement of quality of care is a complex and very important part of what we do. We all feel responsible for the quality improvement process, and staff nurses are active in the quality improvement process at every level. Our Nursing Quality and Safety Committee delivers data and reports to our hospital's Quality Committee, led by our Chief Quality VP Janis Rueping. Those reports help us measure our performance and design and implement initiatives to help us take even better care of you. Results of all reports are shared throughout our professional practice model.
We also make excellent use of the NDNQI (National Database of Nursing Quality Indicators), the database of the American Nurses Association, which collects and evaluates nursing data from hospitals all across the United States. We measure important benchmarks of quality of care like nurse staffing, fall rates, and skin breakdown rates, and we measure ourselves against over 1000 other hospitals when we use the NDNQI's comparative data reports to assess and improve our performance. Quality benchmarks and improvement measures are communicated to all nurses through the Division of Nursing - from Committees to councils and through the Intranet.
One strong example of our quality improvement efforts is the success of our Skin Breakdown Prevention Committee, led by Advanced Practice Nurse Nancy Chaiken. To ensure fewer instances of skin breakdown and bedsores, Nancy led the committee to evaluate existing efforts, and improve them by using the best available products, educating all nurses every month on refined and improved policies, and keeping careful records of each instance of skin breakdown. The results of this endeavor speak for themselves - we dropped considerably below the benchmark in 18 months.
In the pursuit of quality improvement, we rely on the guidance of advanced practice nurses and quality experts, and we rely on each other. How do we know that our best keeps getting better and better? The numbers and reports tell us a lot, and so do you. Patient satisfaction has consistently improved. And that's the most important benchmark of all.
To learn more about our Journey to Magnet Excellence, click here. For more information about Nursing at Swedish Covenant Hospital, please call the Nursing Administration office at (773) 878-8200, Ext. 5600.
