Quality & Safety

What You Should Know About the Flu

St. James Hospital is committed to healing the body, mind and spirit. Our motto—"When Quality Matters"—underscores our commitment to providing the highest quality of care, service, patient safety, and patient/resident/client satisfaction. The objectives of the Strategic Quality Improvement Plan plan reflect St. James Hospital’s commitment to:

• Promote and maintain a values-based organizational culture committed to caring through excellence that supports continuous quality improvement.
• Enhance operational excellence including both clinical outcomes (quality) and perceptions of care (service).
• Systematically identify and prioritize performance improvement opportunities.
• Create a "just" environment that supports the identification and reporting of adverse events and/or near misses.
• Apply external standards and/or references for benchmarking performance.
• Utilize assessment activities as the basis for developing and implementing action plans responsive to findings.
• Communicate results of performance improvement activities to and across all levels of the organization.

A key component of St. James Hospital’s quality commitment is the Patient Safety Program. This formal program allows staff to respond effectively to occurrences in the hospital, nursing home, physician offices or clinics, and proactively reduce the potential of medical errors. Our patient safety and quality activities are modeled after evidenced-based programs, meaning that our care practices are based on research and scientific studies to provide the best possible interventions and treatments.

One way patients and families can evaluate quality at St. James Hospital is through public "report cards" provided by the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Hospital Compare and Nursing Home Compare websites. They publish specific "indicators" of hospital and nursing home quality, and allow you to compare the results of other facilities. St. James Hospital uses these indicators—as well as many other types of quality data—to identify opportunities for improvement.

Quality and Patient Satisfaction Reports

Specific quality and patient satisfaction measures are regularly analyzed by the staff at St. James Hospital. You can select the links below to view a summary of our current performance

Sources of Quality Information

There are various external sources that can be valuable in assessing the quality of a health care organization. St. James Hospital uses all of these sources in monitoring its quality performance. Each source represents quality data in a way that is useful in measuring some aspect of our quality program:

• The Joint Commission
• Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services
• New York State Department of Health
• Hospital Compare
• Nursing Home Compare
• Institute For Healthcare Improvement (IHI)
• Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ)

Reports from these organizations are analyzed regularly and reported to appropriate staff members who have the greatest ability to act upon the data. In addition, St. James Hospital’s Board of Directors reviews the quality results from our hospital and nursing home, as well as recommended action plans and corrective measures.