Quality in healthcare has been defined as “the degree to which health care services for individuals and communities increase the likelihood of achieving desired patient outcomes.” Our entire hospital is involved in activities to measure the quality of clinical and support services. We have a multi-disciplinary Quality Improvement Council that oversees and initiates teams to improve the quality of our current processes. If you have any questions, comments or quality concerns, please contact 712-542-8323.

Quality of care is multi-dimensional; it encompasses safety, effectiveness, patient-centeredness, timeliness, efficiency, and equity. Therefore, there is no single measure you can use to decide which hospital is best. What you can do is judge whether a hospital seems to be doing everything it can to deliver the best care possible to its patients—by adopting appropriate technologies; by hiring, training, and retaining great staff; by developing and maintaining state-of-the-art and patient-friendly facilities; and by practicing medicine in a way that consistently delivers the best and safest care possible for each individual patient.

At CRHC, we fully support the nationwide effort to ensure that patients coming into the hospital with specific conditions receive recommended care. These recommendations are based on years of research on interventions that have been proven to improve outcomes for these conditions. We track many measures of our performance. We compare our performance to specific goals and take steps to improve as needed.

One way of measuring quality of patient care is to conduct surveys of our patients’ perception of their care while at Clarinda Regional Health Center. Eligible patients are surveyed from four areas of CRHC: inpatients, emergency department patients, ambulatory surgery and outpatients of Clarinda Medical Associates Family Medical Clinic. CRHC utilizes a national, standardized survey instrument known as HCAHPS (Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems).

At CRHC, we understand that technical excellence at delivering care is only part of the picture. Patients and family members expect and deserve an equally high level of compassion, communication, respect and comfort. Improving the patient experience is central to the CRHC commitment to being patient-centered.