Igniting the Spark The staff and physicians at Sutter Davis Hospital are on fire to do what’s right for our patients! We proudly accept the Studer Group’s Fire Starter of the Month Award for November 2007.
We began our quality journey with the Studer Group in 2003 with our CEO igniting the first spark to become a five-pillar leader. Today, the consistent results in our pillars are because we have every person, every day committed to every one of our patients. This is the Sutter Difference!
A Community Mainstay
Sutter Davis Hospital is a not-for-profit, 48-bed acute care hospital with a strong outpatient focus. We are committed to providing the communities we serve with dedicated health care professionals and comprehensive programs and services that provide healing to the body and mind.
Our current facility, a 94,000-square-foot building that anchors a 20-acre medical campus, opened in 1994 after a five-year planning process that included extensive employee and community involvement. We are in the midst of a $6.5 million expansion and remodeling project that responds to the health care needs of our growing community. The original building was established in 1968 as a for-profit hospital owned by physicians. Sutter Health purchased the hospital in 1981 to ensure residents of Yolo County would continue to receive quality medical care into the future. Sutter Davis Hospital is fully accredited by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations.
Sutter Davis Hospital enjoys a reputation for providing very good care to our patients each and every day, and for providing an excellent place in which to work and practice medicine for our employees and physicians. Our current expansion and remodeling project is in direct response to the suggestions and ideas offered by our physicians and employees to make Sutter Davis Hospital the best place to work and to seek health care in Yolo County. Our patients receive services from 425 employees and a medical staff of 106.
Our Mission, Vision and Values
Our mission at Sutter Davis Hospital is to enhance the health and well-being of people in the communities we serve, through a not-for-profit commitment to compassion and excellence in health care services. We want to be a recognized leader in transforming health care to meet the needs of the 21st Century. At both the local and regional levels we strive to be the preferred provider to our patients and customers, the best place to work and to practice, and a role model of community citizenship. We subscribe to the key values of:
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Excellence and Quality
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Compassion and Caring
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Honesty and Integrity
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Teamwork
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Community
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Innovation
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Affordability
Patient Services
Sutter Davis Hospital’s comprehensive services include a full array of programs designed to serve the diverse needs of the communities it serves. Services include: 24-hour emergency department, obstetrics, surgery, respiratory therapy, intensive care unit, diagnostic imaging, cardiac and pulmonary rehabilitation, occupational health, laboratory and physical therapy.
Our Sutter Difference Journey
We implemented the Leadership Development Institute model in January 2003, and were joined by 600 other managers from other Sutter affiliates across our three-county region. We hold four LDIs each year and now have a total of 19 LDIs under our belt. Through this model we have rolled out the six “must-haves” and the nine Studer Principles.
Our managers and employees are actively involved in our Rewards and Recognition Team, Patient Satisfaction Team, Measurement Team and Team Leaders meetings. We communicate our Service Excellence activities across all levels of the organization, including monthly manager meetings, quarterly Round the Clock sessions, bi-weekly Safety Rounds, monthly employee and physician newsletters, and through our interdisciplinary practice council that we call the Partnership Council. Our Partnership Councils are our means for ensuring integrated patient care delivery, but it also serves a very important mechanism for communicating to every employee in the organization.
Our commitment to each other and to our patients has garnered us very recent successes within our Sutter Health organization. Sutter Davis Hospital received the both the 2006 and 2007 President’s Awards, an annual honor awarded by President and CEO Patrick Fry. Every Sutter Health affiliate has the opportunity to earn the Sutter Health President’s Awards through top performance or most improved performance relative to Sutter Health’s dashboard measures of clinical quality, service excellence, community benefit and charity care, employee and physician satisfaction, targeted growth, and financial health.
Our Sutter Difference journey has come full circle since our first LDI nearly five years ago. For the past two years, Sutter Davis Hospital CAO Janet Wagner has been honored to be a guest speaker at Quint Studer’s annual “What’s Right in Health Care” national convention. This year, Janet presented information on how to be a five-pillar leader, discussing how leaders and managers must balance their skills among all five pillars rather than focusing on the ones they naturally do best.
Striving to Be a Five-Pillar Leader
We are proud that our results speak for themselves across all of our pillars. Our inpatient satisfaction has consistently been above the 85th percentile this year, and our Birthing Center is consistently in the 90th percentile. Our employees like to work for Sutter Davis, as indicated by our latest employee satisfaction results, which place us in the 90th percentile in the Hay Group database. Our physician satisfaction has been above the 90th percentile on both Jackson and Press Ganey surveys.
Here are some of our other successes:
Service Pillar: Patient satisfaction is measured by Press Ganey Associates Inc. Sutter Davis Hospital has scored in the top 15 percent for the past three quarters in inpatient satisfaction, and the top seven percent in our Birthing Center. We continue to show improvement in the Emergency Department, Ambulatory Surgery, and Medical/Surgical/ICU as service excellence teams develop initiatives to enhance the patient experience. Service improvements include:
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Hourly rounding
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Pre-procedure and discharge phone calls
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AIDET
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Care Pages
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Service Recovery
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Discharge Binders
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My Story
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Weekly data from Press Ganey on the Turtle Poster
As we strive to find ways to improve our patient care, Sutter Davis Hospital joined all Sutter Health hospitals this year in adopting an evidence-based Interdisciplinary Practice Model that helps ensure healthy work environments and positive patient outcomes. The IPM is an organizational framework that incorporates concepts like shared purpose, healthy relationships, meaningful conversations, partnership and integrated services.
The first step in launching our IPM was to develop Unit Based Partnership Councils, which are interdisciplinary teams that address patient care issues. The four Unit Based Councils include Birthing Center, Medical/Surgical/ICU, Emergency Department and Surgery Center. Each council reflects the nursing and ancillary staff members who care for the patients on that unit.
Key to our course correction and hard wiring behaviors is the use of data. We have mastered the use of the Press Ganey Database and post results weekly through our “Turtle Times” poster (see attachment). Sutter Davis Hospital has become known among other hospitals for this poster, which features our mascot Scuttles. Scuttles stands for:
S-Sutter
C-Committed
U-United
T-Today
T-Tomorrow
L-Leadership
E-Excellence
S-Service
People Pillar: Our overall employee turnover rate is 13.6 percent, which marks a steady decrease over the past three years. Over the past year, we have refined our recruitment and retention methods to make sure we find the right people for each job, and do the appropriate training and follow-up. Our mentoring program for new managers and preceptor program for new employees are just two examples of the steps we have taken toward this goal.
We spend a significant amount of effort in educating our managers through Leadership Development Institutes, master’s programs, Carnegie Institute and Sutter Health University. At any given time, our managers are actively improving in their own leadership development.
Our hospital is a strong believer in celebrating our milestones and successes, and we enjoy fantastic involvement of our employees and physicians. We recently held our annual employee picnic with more than 300 employees and their families coming together for a day of fun, festivities and food. We are very excited to be hosting a visit from Quint Studer to our campus in November, and we are planning a celebration this fall with our Sutter Health President/CEO in honor of our receipt of the 2007 President’s Award.
Quality Pillar: We base our quality pillar on the 19 CMS measures displayed on the Hospital Compare website. Our CMS core quality measures are favorable to the current national top decile performance, with 82 percent at the best decile and no measures below the U.S. average. Over the past 12 months, we have implemented the following quality initiatives:
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Rapid Response Team
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Central Line, Pneumonia and Ventilators bundles
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Continued efforts on process improvement initiatives, such as interdepartmental transport, Emergency Department throughput issues and clinic work-ups on pre-surgical patients.
Financial Pillar: We continue to have a strong financial outlook, performing at or above Sutter Health goals and benchmarks. Sutter Davis Hospital has demonstrated affordability over the last several years compared to both national benchmarks and the California benchmarks.
Affordability is the responsibility of every employee at Sutter Davis Hospital and, to ensure we are stewards of good resource utilization, we have developed metrics (“must haves”) for our staff to manage by. These must haves, much like the service pillar must haves, are activities that managers do weekly, biweekly, monthly and quarterly to ensure financial targets are met and we maintain affordable health care for our community.
Growth Pillar: Sutter Davis Hospital is currently in the midst of a remodeling and expansion project scheduled to be complete in early 2008. While our hospital is only 13 years old, we have already outgrown some key areas, such as Emergency, Surgery and Laboratory. We want to provide very good care to all of our patients, and through this remodel we will enhance many areas of the hospital.
Our outpatient services are experiencing the most growth. In the past year, service growth has included:
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A new state-of-the-art Diagnostic Imaging Center that doubles the hospital’s digital imaging capabilities and allows patients more timely and convenient access to services. Features of the new center include a 64-slice CT scanner and expanded women’s imaging services, such as digital mammography, bone density osteoporosis scan and new ultrasound technology.
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An enlarged Cardiac Rehab gym with new equipment to accommodate a larger patient base.
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A new Infusion Center that allows caregivers to simultaneously treat more patients in a more attractive, homelike setting.
This is the Sutter Davis Difference!
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