Southcoast Health today announced that it has received the 2016 Women’s Choice Award as one of America’s Best Hospitals for Patient Safety. This evidence-based designation is the only patient safety award that identifies the country’s best healthcare institutions based on robust criteria that considers female patient satisfaction and clinical excellence.

“Southcoast Health staff work hard every single day to promote and maintain a culture of safety,” said Tim Eixenberger, Chief Nursing Officer for Southcoast Health. “We are proud of this achievement because the safety and wellbeing of our patients is a top priority as we deliver the highest quality healthcare to the communities that we serve.”

The list of award winners, which includes Southcoast Health, represents hospitals that have exceptional performance in limiting a wide range of hospital-associated infections and complications from surgery and medical treatment.

“We honor Southcoast Health for being named and recognized as a hospital of choice among women, for it represents the strongest and most important consumer message in today’s healthcare marketplace when considering that women account for 90 percent of all healthcare decisions. Improving patient safety is not only a matter of error prevention, it’s a focused effort to create the safest patient experience.” said Delia Passi, Founder and CEO of the Women’s Choice Award.

Hospitals that have earned this award have had a low incidence of problems arising from surgical errors and infections. The hospitals that report their frequency to The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) are ranked for each of the following eleven measures:

1. Deaths among patients with serious treatable complications after surgery,
2. Collapsed lung due to medical treatment,
3. Serious blood clots after surgery,
4. A wound that splits open after surgery on the abdomen or pelvis,
5. Accidental cuts and tears from medical treatment,
6. Serious complications,
7. Central line-associated blood stream infections (CLABSI),
8. Catheter-Associated Urinary Tract Infections (CAUTI),
9. Surgical Site Infection from colon surgery (SSI: Colon),
10. Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (MRSA) blood laboratory-identified events (bloodstream infections), and
11. Clostridium difficile (C.diff.) laboratory-identified events (intestinal infections).

Hospitals are eliminated from consideration for the following reasons:

• Not reporting on at least four of the surgical complication measures (1-6) or four of the infection measures (7-11),
• Having a patient recommendation rating in the bottom 25 percent nationally,
• Receiving a CMS rating of “Worse than the U.S. National Rate” for any of the above measures
• Not implementing Safe Surgery Checklists.

For the remaining hospitals, the Women’s Choice Award (WCA) averaged their rankings for all the measures (weighted slightly toward surgical errors as a result of the WCA’s women’s survey) and cut off the award list only including those that averaged in the top half nationally. For more information on the 2016 America’s Best Hospitals for Patient Safety visit http://www.womenschoiceaward.com/awarded/healthcare/.

This adds to Southcoast Health’s growing list of patient safety accolades as it was also recently awarded an “A” grade in the April 2016 Hospital Safety Score by Leapfrog, and achieved the Healthgrades 2016 Patient Safety Excellence Award, placing it among the top 10 percent of hospitals in the nation for its excellent performance.

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