Sid Peterson Memorial Hospital is committed to providing the highest quality healthcare for every patient. With this commitment to quality comes a strong belief in public trust and the value of accountability.

Several very important partnerships exemplify our dedication to service and accountability:

Quality COUNTS

Sid Peterson Memorial Hospital has had quality initiatives in place for more than a decade. Everyone at the hospital plays a role in our quality improvement processes – from hospital administrators, physicians, nurses, pharmacists and emergency and critical care staff to nursing students, volunteers and personnel in environmental services and facilities management.

Patient Safety

Maintaining a safe environment for our patients requires an environment in which patients, their families, staff and leaders can identify and work to eliminate actual or potential patient safety risks. Our staff conduct organization-wide efforts to continuously identify opportunities for systems improvement. Sid Peterson Memorial Hospital adheres to the recommended practices of the Joint Commission’s National Patient Safety Goals and to the patient safety standards of the American Hospital Association and the Texas Hospital Association. Other patient safety initiatives include:

• Introduction of an electronic medical record system;
• Participation in a national patient-safety enhancement program, through the Health Research and Educational Trust and American Hospital Association (AHA) ;
• Reviewing the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality initiatives for evidence-based safe practices;
• Prevention of ventilator-associated and post-op pneumonia;
• Prevention of infections of the uterine lining following C-section;
• Formation of Medication Safety and Fall Prevention Teams;
• Non-use of free-flow IV pumps;
• Reducing risk of health care-associated infections by  implementing and monitoring the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's hand hygiene guidelines

Get With The Guidelines

Sid Peterson Memorial Hospital is proud to receive recognition from the American Heart Association as a Get With The Guidelines ^SM - Coronary Artery Disease hospital. The recognition symbolizes that SPMH is participating in this AHA quality initiative, which recently received the "2004 Innovation in Prevention Award" from Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson.

The program is designed to reduce the risk of recurrent heart attacks by providing patients with proven, evidence-based AHA standards of care. The standards include aggressive risk reduction therapies – such as cholesterol-lowering drugs, aspirin, ACE inhibitors and beta blockers – while patients are hospitalized. Care continues after discharge with cardiac rehabilitation and provision of smoking cessation and weight management counseling.

"100,000 Lives Campaign"

Sid Peterson Memorial Hospital has joined the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s 100,000 Lives Campaign, the first-ever national campaign to save 100,000 lives by implementing proven health care improvement techniques.

Health care facilities that participate in the campaign commit to implement quality improvement changes that address the following: rapid response for patients in decline; adherence to evidence-based care for heart attack; and patient safety issues such as prevention of adverse drug events, surgical and central line infections, and ventilator-acquired pneumonia.

JCAHO

JCAHO is the nation’s leading health care accrediting agency. During our most recent JCAHO visit in May of 2004, surveyors exhaustively reviewed every aspect of SPMH — from patient care to facilities, clinical staff to management. Our acute, outpatient, transitional, home health and hospice services are each accredited with full standards compliance, the Joint Commission’s highest possible accreditation.

The public may contact the Joint Commission's Office of Quality Monitoring to report any concerns or register complaints about a Joint Commission-accredited health care organization by either calling 1-800-994-6610 or emailing complaint@jcaho.org.

CMS

SPMH also is working actively with CMS and other hospitals across the country on a system of public reporting of hospital quality that will provide consumers with the information they need to make informed healthcare decisions. This initiative will help to improve the quality of patient care - not just in Kerrville and rest of the Hill Country, but also in Texas and throughout the United States.

The CMS initiative tracks several measures, including quality of care for patients diagnosed with heart attack, heart failure, or pneumonia - three common and costly medical conditions that are responsible for millions of admissions each year. Hospital performance rates are provided for 10 clinical measures that focus on treatments for these three conditions.

The initial CSM report indicates that SPMH ranks higher than the local, state and national average for the measures for pneumonia. Although SPMH also received ratings of 100 percent for one of the five measures relating to heart attack, hospital protocol calls for stabilizing treatment for heart attack patients followed by immediate transport to San Antonio for specialized care. Therefore the number of SPMH cases included in the study is too small to reliably predict performance

With heart failure measures, hospital staff found an opportunity to improve and refine our processes. An internal review showed us that patients were receiving the appropriate care – the problem was in the paperwork. We took steps to educate staff on the appropriate documentation and use of specific medications, and we expect our scores for the next quarter of 2004 to be higher.