By Community Services at Parrish Medical Center
In school, when you score zero on a test, it’s a bad thing. In sports, if your team has a goose egg on the scoreboard, everyone’s unhappy. However, at Parrish Medical Center (PMC), when your health and safety are concerned, zero is hero.
Parrish Medical Center Hospital Safety has achieved a zero score—the best possible number—in many key benchmarks of hospital safety including:
- No central line-acquired blood stream infections in the past two years (a central line is a lengthy catheter inserted into a vein so that catheter’s end is close to the heart)
- No catheter-associated urinary tract infections (UTIs) in three years
- No instances of ventilator-associated pneumonia in seven years
Safety is a never-ending, never-resting PMC priority. Each year thousands of people are admitted to the hospital; more than 40,000 visits are made to PMC’s emergency room alone. And in the course of a year, millions of operations, procedures, tests, patient movements and more are taking place.
Years ago Parrish understood that healthcare of the future would be centered not on the number of procedures a hospital performs, but on the quality of care and patients’ experience — including safety. Your safety is a vital part of the Parrish mission of “Healing experiences for everyone all the time®” and vision of “Healing families—Healing communities®.”
With all that, PMC has become Florida’s safest hospital, as cited by “Consumer Reports” magazine. “Consumer Reports” based its analysis on Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services data on preventing infections; mortality rates; communication with patients; readmission rates; and overuse of imaging.
PMC has also received six straight (every scoring period) “A’s” in safety from the Leapfrog Group, a national organization of businesses and healthcare providers that monitors and measures hospital patient safety. Parrish is the only hospital to do so in Brevard County, Florida and 1 of only 251 hospitals in the entire nation to earn an ‘A’ Hospital Safety Score® every scoring period.
When speaking about the medical center’s patient safety and clinical quality record, PMC President/CEO, George Mikitarian, refers to this Vince Lombardi quote, “We will be relentless in our pursuit of perfection. We won’t ever be perfect, but in the process we will achieve excellence.”
That intensity to be the best—in service to our community—is what drives our 1,300 PMC care partners.
PMC’s pursuit of perfection led to the Mayo Clinic inviting the medical center to become one of only 32 other hospitals nationwide to join the Mayo Clinic Care Network. Working together, PMC and Mayo will collaborate and share knowledge to reach even higher levels of care and safety.
PMC’s safety record is only part of its service to you. At the same time, PMC is Brevard’s lowest-cost hospital. Our costs average 15 percent below those of other hospitals in the county. For your safety, and that of your families, it matters which hospital you use.
And where safety is concerned, lower is higher, because zero is hero.
When making healthcare decisions quality, safety and cost matter. Compare for yourself at ParrishMed.com/itmatters.
This article appears in the May 2015 issue of SpaceCoast Living HEALTH.
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