GEORGETOWN, Ky. (March 1, 2018) – Georgetown Community Hospital today announced that it has been named a Duke LifePoint Quality Affiliate. 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.
“Ensuring the highest quality care for our patients has always been the top priority for our hospital, but pursuing this important designation has helped take our commitment to the next level,” said William Haugh, chief executive officer of Georgetown Community Hospital. “I’m so proud of our talented team for their dedication to caring for our community, and I look forward to everything we will accomplish together as a Duke LifePoint Quality Affiliate in the future.”
Georgetown Community Hospital is a 75-bed acute care facility serving people in Georgetown, Kentucky, and surrounding areas. To achieve Duke LifePoint Quality Affiliate designation, the Georgetown team implemented a number of best practices and launched new initiatives to engage patients and families, enhance patient safety and improve quality care.
For example, the hospital team implemented bedside shift reporting to help ensure clear communication, reduce the risk of errors and maintain consistency of care during shift changes. Bedside shift reporting is an effective method for transferring information from one provider to another, while also involving patients in discussions about their health, progress and treatment plan. Georgetown also instituted a daily safety brief among the administrative team, as well as all hospital directors, to ensure that leaders have a proactive planning session to address patient safety and staff needs.
Additionally, the hospital created an interdisciplinary team to review all patients who are in the hospital for longer than three days and monitor high-risk patients. Georgetown also established a multidisciplinary “Collaboration Team” that brings together other healthcare providers and community organizations to help reduce avoidable patient readmissions.
“LifePoint’s operations are defined by our mission of Making Communities Healthier and our relentless pursuit of quality,” said David Dill, president and chief operating officer of LifePoint Health. “By being named a Duke LifePoint Quality Affiliate, Georgetown Community Hospital is effectively driving innovations in quality and leading the way to better health for its community. We are delighted to recognize this team’s efforts to further improve quality, enhance safety and engage patients and families in their care.”
The LifePoint National Quality Program was created through a collaboration between LifePoint Health and Duke University Health System. When hospitals enroll in the program, they begin working with Duke and LifePoint quality coaches to evaluate and strengthen their quality programs and processes. Following an initial evaluation, the hospital creates a plan and begins to deploy 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. Duke LifePoint Quality Affiliate designation denotes those hospitals that achieve a broad range of criteria in each of these areas and demonstrate a capacity to continuously measure and improve quality and patient safety.
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