2023 Oregon Rural Quality Excellence Awardees
Meet the 2023 Oregon Rural Health Quality Awardees:
With the nominations open year-round, Oregon’s rural health care and community-based organizations are encouraged to submit their nominations anytime throughout the year via the Oregon Rural Quality Excellence Award webpage. Organizations can submit more than one nomination for their organization. It's time to start sharing your successes and allow your peers to learn from your outstanding efforts!
Each year, ORH will recognize one rural hospital, one rural health clinic and one community-based organization. Nominations are due annually by Aug 31 and awardees will be recognized at the annual Oregon Rural Health Conference, which is held each October.
If your organization has celebrated a success in patient safety or improving the quality of care or health in your community, we want to hear from you! Please submit a nomination.
ORH congratulates the 2023 Oregon Rural Quality Excellence Award awardees! Read about their outstanding projects below:
1. The hospital award goes to Southern Coos Hospital and Health Center located in Bandon on the Oregon coast. They shared their journey to Improve the Patient Experience in a Critical Access Hospital by improving staff engagement and culture. Over the past 18 months, they embarked on creating and adopting a strategic plan that reinforced the importance of quality outcomes, employee engagement and a leadership model of transparency and inclusion. They sought and obtained DNV accreditation, the first accreditation the hospital has ever had in its 23 years of existence, and through months of hard work and dedication across the organization using SMART GOALS, bedside rounding, adopting JUST CULTURE and other quality improvement methods, they have seen transformational change. Together, these strategies resulted in improved employee engagement and patient satisfaction.
2. The RHC award goes to Providence Seaside Clinic, which identified that post-COVID, their Pediatric Combo-10 immunization rates had decreased on internal tracking scorecards. Recognizing that only 37.7% of children with a completed pediatric immunization series, frequently referred to as Pediatric Combo-10, and knowing that up-to-date vaccination status helps keep patients healthy, they focused on work to improve Pediatric Combo-10 immunization rates. The clinic created SMART goals and a plan to Improve Childhood Immunization Rates in A Post Pandemic World by utilizing patient in-reach and outreach methods. The RHC worked with their CCO, utilizing a gap list, to identify patients who needed vaccines and also focused internally on capturing immunizations on patients as they visited their clinic and implemented “vaccine only” appointments. Ultimately, the project increased vaccinations by 11.42% after one year.
3. The community-based organization award goes to One Community Health, which focused its efforts on enhancing HPV vaccination rates through partnerships with community-based organizations and academicians in two of their clinic locations. This organization participated in the Rural Adolescent Vaccine Enterprise (RAVE) Project, led by the Oregon Rural Practice-based Research Network at both clinic locations. Over the 18-month project, they conducted 11 PDSA cycles in alignment with their SMART goals. Through the engagement of a diverse clinical team and community partnerships, they advanced overall HPV vaccination rates at both clinics by 4% for completions and increased their initiation rates by 11.5%. These are big gains during pandemic times! Their rates are now above the state and national average.
Congratulations to these three organizations and their team members for the extraordinary efforts to improve the safety and quality of care of the patients that they serve!