CARING FOR MORE PATIENTS

At a daily bed planning meeting, hospital staff apply analytical and problem-solving skills to make sure a bed is available for every acutely ill patient arriving that day.

Our mission is to deliver world-class patient care to the people we serve. To that end, we implemented multiple initiatives – from a daily bed planning meeting to the addition of rooms in the Emergency Department – to ensure beds are always available to the acutely ill patients who need us most.

A major focus is diversion – how many hours we must divert patients to other hospitals due to lack of available beds. With the remarkable efforts of teams across the hospital, from admitting to discharge, we reduced diversion hours to 3.41 hours in June 2009, our lowest level in four years. That compares to 127 diversion hours the prior June. We accomplished this while experiencing record high numbers of admissions.

Diversion hours in June 2009