Huntsville Hospital Case Study

Huntsville Hospital (HH), located in Northeast Alabama, is part of the Huntsville Hospital Health System, originating in downtown Huntsville, Alabama in the late 1800’s. As the not-for-profit, public hospital system developed, HH became the second largest employer in Madison County, Alabama with an estimated 7000 employees, 2000 nurses and 1000 physicians.
Nine separate campuses constitute the Huntsville Hospital Health System representing more than 1500 hospital beds, a level 1 trauma center and a regional referral center. All healthcare specialties are represented with the exception of burn and transplant medical care, while the emergency room at the main campus provides 85 beds averaging 155,000 annual visits. Education is a large part
All of which are under the management of the Health Care Board of Authority.
According to the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO), the definition of quality exists as the level of health services for populations must be current with real-time professional knowledge providing desired health outcomes (JCAHO 2015). Huntsville Hospital’s strives to provide excellence in health care maintaining a mission to provide quality care that improves the health of the patients we serve (HH 2015). The Quality Assurance program of Huntsville Hospital (HHQA) is an ongoing systemic evaluation of health professionals and the health services serving our patients and community and the impact of those services. The focus of the HHQA continues to be on customers, leadership, and involvement of staff. However, also, visualized as components of the evaluations are structure, process, and outcomes both with internal and external quality assurance and improvement. For example, structure evaluation reveals the hand hygiene system in use, while the process evaluation shows staff performing recommended care based on professional standards of care (Dejonge et al. 2011). Lastly, the outcomes evaluation provides
Huntsville Hospital strives for perfection as well, unfortunately “never events” have occurred within the walls of the hospital. The National Quality Forum literally defines a “never event” as a preventable adverse event occurring in a health care setting that should never happen; like, wrong site surgery, patient falls, and medication errors as examples (Gitlow et al., 2013) A patient admitted to the hospital to receive right wrist surgery woke up with surgery to the left wrist. The event was researched, evaluated, reported, and resulted in changes within the institution. A malpractice case filed against the surgeon and the hospital existed and was settled. The adoption of the mandates of JCAHO allowed for implementation within Huntsville hospital to prevent wrong site surgery consists of many valuable steps such as; asking the patient what surgery and where, marking the surgical site with a permanent marker or using the alternative site marking form to identify, limb alert bands, and also the time-out, allowing anyone involved in the patient care to stop the procedure to ensure accuracy. The responsibility to improve quality patient care is assigned to each individual employee that works for a facility and will proceed in continuing to develop even higher quality, on top of the existing quality, CQI (Hashmi