Lafayette General Medical Center Recognized for Patient Safety

Lafayette General Medical Center (LGMC) has been named a 2015 Women’s Choice Award recipient for being one of America’s Best Hospitals for Patient Safety. This distinction is the only evidence-based designation that identifies the country’s best hospitals based on robust criteria regarding patient safety, specifically what women say they want from a hospital.

The 310 hospitals selected as America’s Best Hospitals for Patient Safety nationwide were identified based on having 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 are ranked for each of 12 measures. Hospitals are eliminated from consideration for: not reporting on at least four of the surgical complication measures or four of the infection measures; having a below-average patient recommendation rating; ranking in the bottom 5% for any one of the measures; and not implementing surgical checklists.

Preventable medical errors persist as the No. 3 killer in the U.S., – third only to heart disease and cancer – claiming the lives of some 400,000 people each year. (Healthcare ITNews, July 2014)
A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that employers paid $39,000 extra every time an employee suffered a surgical site infection.

“Patient safety is at the heart of our patient-centered approach to care,” says LGMC CEOPatrick W. Gandy, Jr. “Our new emergency and surgery areas were designed with infection control and prevention in mind. So, with that, we should continue to be a place where women can feel comfortable that their safety is our highest priority,” says Gandy.

“We honor Lafayette General for being named and recognized as a hospital of choice among women,” says Delia Passi, CEO and founder of WomenCertified Inc., home to the Women’s Choice Award, and former publisher of Working Mother magazine. “This represents the strongest and most important consumer message in today’s healthcare marketplace, considering women account for 90% of all health care decisions,” she says.

“Whether it is poor care coordination, errors in test results, mislabeled specimens, or a surgical item being left inside a patient, lives are being lost and women need to know which hospitals they can trust to follow the highest patient safety standards to ensure the proper quality care of their loved ones,” adds Passi. “Improving patient safety is not only a matter of error prevention, but it’s a calculated step in spending the extra time needed to deliver quality care that boosts a patient’s safety.”