The American Nurses Association announced January 27 that the Medical Center of the Rockies and Poudre Valley Hospital were among five U.S. hospitals receiving a national award for achieving and sustaining outstanding nursing quality that improves patient care and safety.

“The common traits of the award-winning hospitals are strong leadership, teamwork, commitment to ongoing improvement in patient care quality, continuous staff education and efficient use of resources,” said ANA President Karen A. Daley.

The awards are based on nursing performance measures reported to ANA’s National Database of Nursing Quality Indicators. NDNQI is the healthcare industry’s only comparative database used to make improvements in nursing services, patient safety and other areas of care.

The award recipients were identified as the top five performers among more than 1,700 hospitals—one of every three hospitals nationwide—that report results to the database. The database information allows individual nursing units to compare their performance to similar units at other hospitals at the local, state, regional, and national levels.

PVH, MCR, which are owned by Poudre Valley Health System, and the other three hospitals received the NDNQI Award for Outstanding Nursing Quality January 27 at the 5th annual NDNQI conference in Miami, an event attended by 1,000 nursing and healthcare quality leaders. This was the fourth consecutive year that PVH received the award and the first year for MCR. In 2008, PVH was the first hospital to receive the award after it was created.

Craig Luzinski, PVH’s chief nursing officer, said the award reflects the personal commitment of Poudre Valley Health System nurses, support staff and physicians to provide world-class care. PVH and MCR are owned by PVHS.

“Our staff is deeply involved in quality improvement efforts and offering the most advanced patient care practices,” Luzinski said.

Kay Miller, MCR’s chief nursing officer, said MCR and PVH nurses have remained among the best in the nation with the help of comparative data from NDNQI and other sources that they can use to identify ways to make improvements.

“This helps us define and pursue proven strategies and practices that keep us at the forefront of excellence in patient care,” Miller said. “Our patients and the community are the ones who benefit.”

The other three hospitals that received an award were the University of Kansas Medical Center, Kansas City, Kansas; Children’s Hospital & Medical Center, Omaha; and Craig Hospital, Englewood, Colo.

ANA said the five award-winners demonstrated superior results and sustained improvement in patient outcomes and high nurse job satisfaction on the broad range of nursing-sensitive performance indicators tracked by NDNQI. Hospital-acquired pressure ulcers, patient falls with injury, infections acquired as a result of hospitalization and nurse turnover are among indicators tracked.

In any given quarter, more than 15,000 nursing units report performance data. This data provides links between patient outcomes and the quality of nursing services, and indicates connections between patient outcomes and nurse staffing levels, education and skills, leading to more effective staffing plans. NDNQI also measures nurse satisfaction through a work environment survey.

This was the fourth consecutive year that PVH received the award and the first year for MCR. In 2008, PVH was the first hospital to receive the award after it was created.

An MCR effort to reduce catheter-associated urinary tract infections was included in NDNQI's Case Studies in Nursing Quality Improvement publication earlier this year. The effort eliminated so-called CAUTIs for five consecutive quarters.

--PVHS--

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