Hartsville hospital recognized for achievements in patient and family engagement, quality care and patient safety
Trousdale Medical Center (TMC), a member of HighPoint Health System, today announced that it has been named a LifePoint Health National Quality Leader. This designation recognizes hospitals within the LifePoint Health system that have enrolled in the LifePoint National Quality Program and succeeded in transforming their culture of safety and achieving high standards of quality care, performance improvement and patient engagement.
“This is an incredible day for our team that recognizes years of leadership and an ingrained day-to-day commitment to quality care,” said Carolyn Cardwell Sparks, chief executive officer of TMC. “I could not be prouder of our team for this accomplishment and want to specifically recognize Jennifer Holder, chief nursing officer, Kelly Anderson, director of nursing, and Christy Cooley, quality director, along with all of our dedicated leaders and front-line staff for their leadership on our quality journey. The National Quality Program creates an evidence-based pathway for improving patient safety and quality outcomes, and we are proud to have achieved designation as a National Quality Leader.”
TMC is a 25-bed critical access hospital that this year celebrates its 70th anniversary serving patients in Hartsville and the surrounding region. TMC offers a range of inpatient, outpatient and emergency services for adults and children. To achieve LifePoint Health National Quality Leader designation, the TMC team implemented a number of best practices and launched new initiatives to engage patients and families, enhance patient safety and improve quality care. Among these initiatives, TMC team members worked with local emergency medical services agencies to improve treatment times for early cardiac care to achieve chest pain accreditation and instituted routine follow-up calls to discharged patients to ensure at-home care instructions were understood and to assist with follow-up care needs. TMC also improved clinician and patient engagement and communication by implementing bedside shift reporting so that nurses and clinical team members could include patients and family members in shift hand-offs and by forming an interdisciplinary team to conduct regular patient rounding. Additionally, TMC expanded clinical coverage so that advanced practice providers are now on-site 24/7 for care management.
“I take great pride in the team at Trousdale Medical Center,” said Jason Zachariah, executive vice president, chief operating officer of LifePoint Health. “Achieving designation as a LifePoint Health National Quality Leader demonstrates their commitment to creating a culture of safety and constantly seeking to improve how they care for the community. The team’s work to improve patient communication and enhance clinical support is evidence that they consistently champion quality care and keep patients at the center of everything they do.”
When hospitals enroll in the National Quality Program, they begin working with LifePoint quality experts to evaluate and strengthen their quality programs and processes. Following an initial evaluation, the hospital creates a plan and begins to employ changes that will help it achieve quality improvement benchmarks and establish long-term solutions to sustain its results.
In addition to evaluating common quality care and patient safety metrics, the LifePoint National Quality Program focuses on foundational elements required to sustain quality care, including committed leadership, systems to ensure continuous performance and process improvement, and a culture dedicated to safety. LifePoint Health National Quality Leader designation denotes those hospitals that have achieved a broad range of criteria in each of these areas and demonstrate a capacity to continuously measure and improve quality and patient safety.
“When we began our journey with the National Quality Program in 2014, we knew we were doing the hard, daily work of building a culture where patient safety and quality care is foundational to everything we do,” said Jennifer Holder, RN, BSN, MBA, CPPS, chief nursing officer for TMC. “Our team has risen to the challenge again and again, committing themselves to the hard work of process improvement to ensure our patients benefit from our consistent application of best practices. To know that we have been able to achieve this despite everything we’ve faced through the pandemic is particularly meaningful and further underscores the commitment of this team to raising the bar.”
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