Princeton HealthCare System receives accreditation review
By: Courtney Gross
Princeton HealthCare System had some unusual visitors this week, and they weren’t patients.
For more than five decades, members of The Joint Commission a national hospital accreditation organization have interviewed patients and staff, and inspected services throughout the Princeton HealthCare System, the University Medical Center at Princeton’s parent company, to assess how the health care organization matches up against national standards.
Last undertaken in Princeton in 2004, the surveying process is part of a three-year reporting program that measures quality of patient care at the hospital.
In 2004, PHCS received The Joint Commission’s gold seal of approval the highest ranking a medical care facility can receive. Gold-ranking health care systems must be surveyed on-site every three years and their laboratories every two years.
In 1954, the Joint Commission first accredited PHCS, PHCS director of Marketing and Public Affairs Amy Franco Rodriguez said. The reports are used by PHCS to improve patient safety and care, she added.
"Our objective is to ensure we provide an exceptional level of patient care to the community by instituting best practices for care and safety, continuously engaging in performance improvement initiatives and integrating those practices at every level of our organization," Ms. Rodriguez said in an e-mailed statement.
According to a representative from the Joint Commission, surveyors will be on site throughout the week, taking both complaints and praise from patients and staff. In several months, Char Hill of The Joint Commission said, the commission will issue a report detailing its findings with an updated ranking for Princeton HealthCare System.
The nonprofit commission surveys nearly 15,000 health care organizations nationwide against more than 250 national standards for quality of service. The Joint Commission, Ms. Hill said, has evaluated approximately 80 percent of hospitals in the United States.
The organization visits Princeton HealthCare System’s facilities associated with home care, long-term care, behavior health care and the hospital, all of which have been accredited.
Often the surveyors, Ms. Hill said, randomly choose a patient’s history and follow the patient from admittance to discharge. They will analyze the process of a physician prescribing medication, how the prescription is filled and then how it is administered to the patient.
"There are systems in the delivery of health care that are critical, for instance medication management," Ms. Hill said. "What do they do to make sure the right medication gets to the right patient at the right time?" Ms. Hill asked.
All of this, Ms. Hill said, is to ensure patients are satisfied with their care and informed of its efficiency.
The surveyors usually span all aspects of the medical field, Ms. Hill said, from physicians to nurses to administrators.
According to the commission’s most recent report for Princeton HealthCare System, its rankings were either average or above average compared to other accredited organizations.
For heart-attack care, the University Medical Center at Princeton was measured as average, while the hospital’s performance in pneumonia care and heart-failure care was above average. This data was gathered from July 2005 through June 2006, according to the report.
According to the last full survey of the PHCS in 2004, the medical center satisfactorily met all of the national patient safety goals, some of which include "time outs" prior to surgery to ensure it’s the right patient and correct procedure as well as following the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sanitary guidelines.