For the second year in a row, Rumford Hospital has been honored by an international quality improvement forum.
Rumford Hospital submitted four proposals storyboard presentations at the 2007 Annual National Forum on Quality Improvement in Health Care. These storyboards depict the processes that led to quality improvements in the hospital. In a prestigious honor for a small hospital, all four storyboard presentations were selected for display and discussion, where they will be seen by about 6,000 quality improvement specialists from around the world.
The highly competitive process of placing a storyboard at the forum includes a lengthy application to the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), which sponsors the forum. IHI, based in Cambridge, MA, is a not-for-profit organization that helps to lead the improvement of health care throughout the world. The applications detailed the work of the quality teams at Rumford Hospital and the measurable outcomes of their initiatives.
This year, Rumford Hospital submitted proposals outlining the work of four very different interdisciplinary teams that worked on four entirely separate and disparate issues: the Emergency Preparedness Team, the Expansion and Treatment Therapies in Patients Admitted with Aspiration Pneumonia Team, the SBAR Implementation on Maternity Team, and The Caring Crafters.
"We submitted four thinking one might be selected and were very pleased and surprised to have all four win a place in this prestigious international conference," said Deborah Oliver, the hospital's director of health information and quality. "Last year our winning storyboard was located between a storyboard from Singapore General Hospital and one from University College Hospital, London, England, so you can see it is truly an international honor to be chosen."
Rumford Hospital is highly focused on quality of care, according to Oliver. "We spend a great deal of time on quality initiatives and improving care wherever we can, almost always using the interdisciplinary team approach to accomplish the work." The sharp focus on quality includes expecting every department to report its quality initiatives and results to the Operations Group, the top managers at the hospital, on a regular basis. The Rumford Hospital Board also receives quality reports at each of its monthly meetings.
Quality teams at Rumford Hospital produce such exemplary results as shown above, when the hospital's decontamination team was the first hospital team to be activated in the state of Maine.