PMH accreditation reflects streamlined cardiac care
BRAWLEY — When a patient is experiencing chest pains attributable to a heart attack, time is muscle. That’s why it is important to have processes in place to ensure the patient is diagnosed, treated and, if necessary, transferred as quickly as possible.
Pioneers Memorial Hospital announced recently that its staff has successfully streamlined that process as part of a collective effort to earn recognition as an accredited Chest Pain Center.
The accreditation came from the American College of Cardiology, which awarded PMH the HeartCARE Center National Distinction of Excellence after meeting accreditation criteria and reporting ongoing performance registry.
To earn this designation, PMH staff needed to meet a set of standards, including participation in at least two ACC Accreditation Services programs and a pair of targeted quality improvement campaigns designed to help hospitals and institutions close gaps in guideline- based care.
“It’s a hard accreditation to obtain,” said Gerardo Ibarra, director of the hospital’s emergency department. “There are a lot of requirements that go into it that we need to meet. There’s a lot of policies, procedures that we needed to create to be able to meet the requirements.”
The program sets several benchmarks the hospital must meet in dealing with a heart attack patient.
“It’s not just the emergency department; it’s the whole hospital,” Ibarra said. “We have to have a process from when the patients come through the ER all the way down to when they get admitted and they get discharged. There’s a whole process that goes into place to make sure the patient gets the proper care.”
“We have leaders who meet on a monthly basis to review cases, patient charts and any discrepancies that we would find, and we would talk about them to see how we can improve them,” said PMH Charge Nurse Andrea Sanchez.
“Time is muscle when it comes to chest pain,” she said, “so it’s really important that there’s early recognition, and luckily, we’ve been improving on that.”
Ibarra said the hospital also has worked with Reach and with Scripps to cut down on the time that elapses between a patient arriving at Pioneers and being flown to San Diego. He said that time is down to 40 minutes from previously being as long as two to three hours.
This process will be further streamlined when PMH’s own cardiac catheterization lab is completed and operating at full swing. That unit will expand options for local care.
“Right now, every one of those ( heart attack) patients is going primarily to San Diego for care,” said Dr. Stacy Gomez, an emergency medicine physician at PMH, “so I think that this is going to be a really great asset for the whole community.”
“Pioneers Memorial is advancing cardiology care to new levels in our county,” said Pioneers Memorial Healthcare
District CEO Larry Lewis. “This Chest Pain Center accreditation shows our commitment to the community and reflects the year of work put in by our emergency department physicians, nurses and staff.
Or as Ibarra, who spearheaded the accreditation effort, explained: “This mean when you come to the emergency department with any cardiac issues, you are going to get the proper care that you need.”