Op ed: Stanford Health Care’s commitment to patient safety, quality and the most favorable patient outcomes

The same tactics SEIU was using with Dialysis.

In a recent op-ed published in these pages, a Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West (SEIU – UHW) representative attacked nationally recognized hospital quality experts and questioned Stanford Health Care’s (SHC’s) commitment to patient and employee safety.

This was not the studied assessment of a medical or quality expert, but rather a tactic adopted by a labor union as a negotiating strategy. As a clinician who has day-to-day knowledge of the manner in which SHC provides care, I want to assure our community that patient safety is our priority, that we invest heavily in advancing it and that the results are clear. U.S. News and World Report, for example, ranked SHC 9th among all U.S. hospitals in its 2017-18 Best Hospitals Honor Roll. In fact, SHC has ranked consistently among the nation’s top hospitals for years in many ranking systems.

Academic medical centers (AMCs), and Stanford in particular, provide care for some of the sickest patients in the world. Our case mix index, a federal index of the resources required to treat patients and hence of their acuity of illness, is currently 2.53 — among the highest of all AMCs. These very ill patients are particularly prone to health care-associated infections, due to their frailty and vulnerability, and we continually seek to protect them by improving our already excellent infection control. Currently, we have more than 120 unique safety and quality initiatives, incorporating the expertise of clinicians, patients and infection control physicians.

To read the entire article, please click here to be redirected to the original article source, The Standord Daily.