Top Hospital Award for outstanding quality and safety goes to Adventist Health Hanford
Adventist Health Hanford is among only 10 hospitals in California to earn 2019 Top Teaching Hospital accolades for patient safety and quality. The award is from The Leapfrog Group, a national watchdog organization of employers and other purchasers focused on healthcare safety and quality, and is widely acknowledged as one of the most competitive honors American hospitals can receive.
Only 118 hospitals earned Top Hospital awards, which include the following categories:
• Top Children’s Hospitals
• Top General Hospitals
• Top Rural Hospitals
• Top Teaching Hospitals
Adventist Health Hanford’s Top Teaching award highlights the hospital’s family medicine residency training program at Adventist Health Medical Office – Hanford Family Medicine Residency, which is a three-year program that exposes 12 residents a year, or physicians in training, to healthcare in rural areas.
“The benefit of a residency program to our community is the increased access to providers, many of whom are bilingual,” says Dr. John Zweifler, medical director for Clinical Integration and Graduate Medical Education for Adventist Health in the Central Valley. “As physicians, we also appreciate the residents’ expertise, when seeking second opinions regarding patient care.”
The Top Teaching Hospital award comes just one month after Adventist Health Hanford earned an A grade in patient safety, also from The Leapfrog Group.
“Our teams are constantly focused on improving care, safety and quality, and our residencies are an important part of that,” says Andrea Kofl, president of Adventist Health in the Central Valley. “Resident physicians learn on the leading edges of medicine, and our patients and team benefit from their insights and perspectives.”
Performance across many areas of hospital care is considered in establishing the qualifications for the Top Teaching Hospital award, including infection rates, practices for safer surgery, maternity care and the hospital’s capacity to prevent medication errors. The rigorous standards are defined in each year’s Top Hospital Methodology.
To qualify for the Top Hospitals distinction, hospitals must rank top among peers in the 2019 Leapfrog Hospital Survey, which assesses hospital performance on the highest known standards for quality and patient safety, and achieve top performance in its category. The full list of institutions honored as 2019 Top Hospitals is available at www.leapfroggroup.org/tophospitals.
To view a video on Adventist Health’s residency programs in Hanford and Reedley, visit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pb9UWKTi2vg&feature=youtu.be
