Newport Hospitals & Health Services, Kittitas Valley Healthcare receive WSHA Rural Quality ~ Everyday Extraordinary Award

June 28, 2017

In recognition of outstanding improvement on the quality and safety of rural health care

Contact: Tim Pfarr, Communications Coordinator, WSHA, timp@wsha.org or 206/920-3369

SEATTLE – Newport Hospitals & Health Services and Kittitas Valley Healthcare received the Washington State Hospital Association’s 2017 Rural Quality ~ Everyday Extraordinary Award. Newport Hospitals & Health Services received the award for its success in its “Surgical Site Infection Prevention Project,” and Kittitas Valley Healthcare received the award for its success in its “KVH Sepsis Taskforce.”

“Washington’s rural hospitals have always been ready to be held to the same standards of their urban and suburban counterparts,” WSHA Senior Vice President for Patient Safety Jennifer Graves said. “They care deeply about providing top-quality care to their communities, and we are proud to recognize the many caregivers at Newport and Kittitas for their achievements in reducing surgical site infections.”

“We take surgical site, and all infections very seriously,” Newport CEO Tom Wilbur said. “Our multidisciplinary team did incredible work in identifying areas for improvement to protect patients from contracting surgical site infections.” Although these types of infections have decreased significantly through process change and adoption of best practices, the goal is always to eliminate them completely.

“Our Sepsis Taskforce did incredible work in process improvement to identify and treat sepsis rapidly in order to increase positive outcomes of this always serious and often-tragic disease,” Kittitas Valley Healthcare CEO Julie Petersen said.

“It was important to the judges that the award winners have measurable results,” said Linda Michel, WSHA Director of Rural Quality. “Kittitas and Newport’s submissions and the outcomes of their process improvements were extremely impressive, and demonstrates their commitment to safe, effective health care for the communities they serve.”

The award recognizes outstanding process improvements efforts by a rural health care facility. Any rural facility wishing to be considered for the award submitted answers to 10 essay questions. Submissions were blinded and evaluated by a panel of judges from WSHA, the Washington State Department of Health, Qualis and a rural quality leader. Scoring was a point system that included certain number of points for process improvement tools used for data collection, data analysis, identifying the root cause of the process failure, multidisciplinary teamwork, communication and the outcome of the project.

The Rural Quality ~ Everyday Extraordinary Award was presented to Newport and Kittitas at WSHA & AWPHD’s 41st Annual Leadership Conference at Campbell’s Resort in Chelan, Wash., on June 27, 2017.

About WSHA

The Washington State Hospital Association works to improve the health of all Washington state residents by being active on key issues of policy and quality. WSHA represents more than 100 hospitals and health systems in the state, including those that are non-profit, investor-owned, and county, state and military hospitals. In 2005, WSHA launched the Patient Safety program to help hospitals improve patient safety by supporting the wide-spread adoption of evidence-based clinical practices. WSHA works to improve the health of the people of the state by becoming involved in all matters affecting the delivery, quality, accessibility, affordability and continuity of health care.

Visit www.wsha.org for more information.

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