Safety first: Here’s how Lee’s Summit Medical Center made top grade for safety
Lee’s Summit Medical Center is celebrating receiving a 2022 Patient Safety Excellence Award from the website Healthgrades.
“We’re very proud to receive that recognition, especially in the face of the challenges that healthcare, and our hospital included, have faced over the last couple of years. It’s nice to be able to share with our staff that recognition of their hard work and continued commitment to taking great care of our community,” said Paige Baker, the hospital’s chief nursing officer.
To determine the award, Healthgrades analyzed how often various common patient safety complaints occurred at hospitals all over the country.
Those incidents included, among others, falling in the hospital and sustaining a hip fracture, blood clots appearing in the lungs or legs after surgery and pressure sores developed during a hospital stay.
“Many patients in the hospital are at risk of injury from falls. With our culture of safety, looking at what those vulnerabilities are for our patients and making sure we’re compensating through the care that we provide, (we’re) making sure we have all the support,” Baker said.
Recently, that has come in the form of purchasing new hospital beds.
“We’re looking at every avenue possible to support our staff in technology and systems that can help supplement safety in any way,” Baker said.
Baker also attributes the hospital’s success to clearly defined guidelines that help staff do things the same way each time to prevent accidental harm.
“If processes are structured and following a standard, and staff and patients know what to expect, know how to do it, have a way to do it the same each time, you are less likely to have failure or fallout,” Baker said. “It’s very similar to safety practices in other industries. Healthcare is not unique, other than we’re taking care of people and bodies, and bodies can be more complex than a mechanical car.
Healthgrades collected the publicly reported data from 2018 to 2020, but did not include data from COVID patients in its analysis.
“COVID has challenged so many systems and processes and data points that it’s going to take all of us and especially the data-driven systems times to adjust. Even each different variant of COVID brought challenges for all of these different metrics, so I think it’s just too soon to know how to be able to interpret that data,” Baker said.
Other hospitals in the area that also received this year’s patient safety award include the University of Kansas Health System, AdventHealth Shawnee Mission, Menorah Medical Center, Saint Luke’s South Hospital and Providence Medical Center in Kansas and Research Medical Center and Saint Luke’s North Hospital, Barry Road.