| For immediate release: Jan. 26, 2012 |
Gary Kimsey, 970.495.7427, glk@pvhs.org
|
For the fifth year in a row, the nation's leading nurse association presented its top award Jan. 26 to Poudre Valley Hospital for the outstanding achievements that nurses accomplish in patient care and safety.
The American Nurses Association, which represents 3.1 million nurses in the U.S., presented the Fort Collins hospital in Colorado with the Award for Outstanding Nursing Quality. The presentation was made in Las Vegas during the annual AHA nursing quality conference.
The award was based on the association's National Database of Nursing Quality Indicators. TheNDNQI is used to validate the quality of nursing care nationwide and in local hospitals.
ANA presented an award to six hospitals.
"The award-winning hospitals recognize the importance of basing their nursing care strategies on data showing what produced the best results for patients," said Karen A. Daley, ANA president. "They are committed to continuous improvement, outstanding teamwork, effective leadership and evidence-based practices."
PVH was the first hospital to receive the annual award when it was created in 2008 and is the only one that has continued to receive the honor each year since then.
Donna Poduska, PVH's chief nursing officer, said the hospital has received the award each year because of the quality patient care the organization maintains by hiring the profession's top nurses and keeping them trained on the most advanced patient care practices. PVH employees 1,001 registered nurses and has been repeatedly recognized nationally for care by nurses.
"There is a huge amount of personal commitment and pride among our nurses in providing outstanding patient care day to day," Poduska said. "Our nurses work closely with Fort Collins doctors to provide extremely high quality patent care."
The comprehensive NDNQI is used by 1,400 hospitals to help make improvements in nursing services, patient safety and other areas of care. Information in the database allows individual nursing units to compare their performance to similar units at other hospitals at the local, state, regional, and national levels.
The NDNQI tracks a broad range of factors impacted by the performance of nurses. Indicators are the numbers of hospital-acquired pressure ulcers; patient falls; and, among others, infections acquired as a result of hospitalization.
Daley said award recipients demonstrated superior results and sustained improvement in inpatient care and nurse job satisfaction, which is also tracked by the NDNQI.
As an example of nursing quality at PVH, Poduska pointed to what she called an outstanding record for the hospital in staving off a dangerous illness--ventilator-associated pneumonia--that patients often acquire in many hospitals across America. PVH has gone more than 900 days without an occurrence of the pneumonia in intensive care unit patients who are placed on ventilators to help with breathing.
"This is a remarkable accomplishment directly resulting from the carefully exacting work that our nurses do to maintain high-quality patient care," Poduska said.
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