Our Quality and Safety Program promotes care that is free from harm, achieves the best possible clinical results, and is delivered promptly with compassion.
Our program focuses on:
- Valuing the patient, their family and the overall experience
- Delivering the right care at the right time in the right place
- Eliminating hospital-acquired infections and preventable harm
- Promoting a culture of safety
- Using data to drive improvements in systems and processes
We foster a culture of "best practices," to ensure optimal patient care in the safest environment, using the expertise and innovative ideas of all our team members. We are continuously analyzing data and care protocols and processes to prevent and reduce infections and using new technology and ongoing education to provide the best quality care for patients.
Recent News
CAUTI-free
Catheter-associated urinary tract infections (CAUTI) are the most common type of health care-associated infection, accounting for nearly a third of infections reported by acute care hospitals. These infections can prolong a patient’s hospital stay and lead to serious complications, including death. Through meticulous surveillance and stewardship, we have been CAUTI-free on all of our units for more than two years and have never had a CAUTI on our medical or surgical units.
Preventable falls
Each year in the U.S., nearly 1 million patients experience falls while in the hospital, with one quarter of those patients sustaining an injury. We have a multidisciplinary Falls Prevention team that works to find commonsense solutions to keep our patients safe. The top 25% of hospitals nationwide report one fall with injury per 4,000 patient days. Lancaster Medical Center has surpassed that – at 1 per 5,250 patient days.
Hand hygiene
Being fully compliant with proper hand hygiene is critically important to minimize the risk of patients developing a health care-associated infection. Led by our infection preventionists, our multidisciplinary hand hygiene team and over five dozen “secret shoppers” have completed more than 100 audits per month on all clinical units and have educated every new staff member on the importance of hand hygiene. Through these efforts, we’ve been able to improve hand hygiene compliance rate to over 90%—a significant step in our journey to zero harm.