Assuring Quality and Protecting Your Safety
As an institution and as individual healthcare professionals, we are committed to protecting patient safety and providing quality care. It’s at the heart of everything we do at Kingman Regional Medical Center (KRMC).
To us, quality means: doing the right thing at the right time, for the right person, and having the best possible result. Patient safety—preventing harm to patients—underlies all aspects of our healthcare culture.
We work to improve the quality of our services and the safety of our patients on a continuous basis. To evaluate our performance, we use industry-wide quality standards and measures. These measures serve as vital tools to identify where improvements are needed and allow us to focus on the areas that require the most attention.
KRMC continues to implement process improvements to prevent medical errors, falls, accidents and infections for the safety of patients in our care.
Learn more about our safety initiatives below:
Bedside Medication Delivery
Kingman Regional Medical Center continuously looks for ways to improve the experience of our patients. In August 2019, KRMC piloted our Meds to Beds program. We found that this program expands access to vital medication for patients. Today, Meds to Beds is available to all hospitalized patients.
Surgical Safety Checklist
Kingman Regional Medical Center uses the World Health Organization's surgical safety checklist to ensure patient safety throughout a procedure. The checklist helps to improve communication among the procedural team and safeguard against mistakes or missed steps.
Monitoring for Inequities in Care
Kingman Regional Medical Center recognizes the importance of providing optimal care to all persons, regardless of race or ethnicity. To monitor for inequalities in care and, we attempt to collect demographic data as well as information about social determinants of health from patients seeking care. For 2022 and 2023, we reviewed the data for mothers who delivered their babies at KRMC to evaluate for disparities between racial or ethnic groups. The data showed no significant disparity between ethnic groups. Read the report here.
Alliance for Innovation on Maternal Health
In 2022, Kingman Regional Medical Center began participating in the Alliance for Innovation on Maternal Health’s (AIM) Program. The AIM is a national program focused on increasing maternal safety and aligning care with evidenced based practice and has been adopted by the Arizona Hospital and Healthcare Association (AzHHA) and the Arizona Department of Health Services (ADHS).
The Hypertension Bundle was the first bundle AIM rolled out. The goal of the Hypertension Bundle is to treat maternal hypertension within one hour. KRMC began collecting baseline data in 2022. The data collected showed although we were routinely treating maternal hypertension, we were not treating within one hour. We were able to identify and correct several process based issues, such as default alarm sounds, lack of protocols and audible alarms at the nurses station. We corrected these issues and improved significantly in 2023.
The AIM goal for the Hypertension bundle was 80%. We continued to review data and share feedback with the team. We were able to isolate issues and tackle them as quickly as possible. We were able to increase our overall compliance rate to 90%.
Commitment to continued progress
KRMC’s staff – from nurses to housekeepers to senior managers – have been hard at work improving patient safety. We know this work is never finished, and we are dedicated to maintaining a focus on enhancing our practices for the best interests of our patients.