Modern Healthcare congratulates the winners and honorable mentions of the 14th annual Spirit of Excellence Awards, co-sponsored by Sodexho Health Care Services. This year’s winners and runners-up are profiled on the following pages. Each of the five winners will receive a cash prize of $5,000, and each of the five honorable mentions will receive a $1,500 cash prize.
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The need for a new hospital provided Parrish Medical Center with an opportunity to brainstorm how best to create a healing environment, and the resulting 210-bed, 375,000-square-foot, $80 million facility in Titusville, Fla., might sound more like a spa or a resort than a hospital.
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Patients are becoming better educated about their conditions and better able to communicate effectively with staff at 174-bed Inova Fair Oaks Hospital in Fairfax, Va., thanks to the GetWellNetwork, a customizable software solution implemented in 2004.The system uses in-room television to provide patient-specific health education materials, two-way communication in real-time with responsible staff members and entertainment options to help patients pass the time.
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Shift changes among nurses at 454-bed Provena St. Joseph Medical Center in Joliet, Ill., had become a chaotic, noisy mess that led to a lack of privacy for patients and ballooning overtime for the nurses themselves as they struggled to communicate patients’ status.Communication breakdowns from such handoffs sometimes lead to medical errors, which led the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations to require that standards for handoff communication be developed.
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More than three-quarters of employees responding to a June 2001 survey at 262-bed Clifton Springs (N.Y.) Hospital & Clinic said they were uncomfortable reporting medical errors. Recognizing a need to change its culture, the organization worked to make such reporting blame-free, to encourage open communication and to develop leadership on those issues. To meet that need, Clifton Springs hired a full-time patient-safety coordinator.
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Breast cancer survivors often suffer from side effects such as weight gain and fatigue that persist long after their cancer is gone.
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Stroke is the third leading cause of death in the U.S., and blacks face a greater statistical risk of stroke than the general population. Nazareth Hospital, a 233-bed facility in Philadelphia, has spent the past 16 months targeting the black community with free stroke education and screenings by working with churches, senior centers, civic groups and workplaces.
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St. John Health in Warren, Mich., faced the same shortages of nurses and other clinicians as many other healthcare organizations. So the eight-hospital system embarked upon a service excellence initiative in early 2005 that embraced both staff satisfaction and customer service, with an eye toward becoming both an employer and a provider of choice.
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DaVita, an independent provider of kidney dialysis services with 14,000 employees, has cut its turnover in half in the five years since it instituted a program that helps employees work on personal life skills such as conflict resolution, leadership, time management and goal setting.
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More than 9,000 people in the greater Columbus, Ga., area have received slices of the more than $1 million that employees of 217-bed St. Francis Hospital have contributed to the 12-year-old Caring Hospital Employees Envision Real Success program.
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Hancock Medical Center in Bay St. Louis, Miss., was forced to close after all major departments sustained floodwaters during Hurricane Katrina, which caused more than $20 million in damage.Some 75% of employees and physicians lost their homes and/or most of their possessions, but the hospital’s staff proved to be a force of nature of its own. They have restored critical medical services, applied plasterboard, painted and restocked the facility themselves, creating temporary employment and keeping physicians onboard.
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