Sutter Davis Hospital Receives Presidential Award

DAVIS, Calif. — Sutter Davis Hospital (SDH) became the smallest hospital to be awarded the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, a presidential award presented annually to just three organizations that have demonstrated quality and performance excellence. The 48-bed acute care hospital, which provides medical-surgical, intensive care, birthing emergency care and surgical services, was a 2013 award recipient.

While the National Institute of Standards and Technology manages the award and the American Society for Quality administers it, an independent board of examiners is charged with selecting the annual three winners. Recipients are judged in seven categories: leadership; strategic planning; customer and market focus; measurement, analysis and knowledge management; human resource focus; process management; and organizational performance results. Organizations in business, education and health care may be recognized with the award.

“Winning the Baldrige says something to your community,” said Janet Wagner, chief administrative officer at Sutter Davis, in a statement. “It tells them that you’ve got one of the best hospitals in the country and that the people there are working very hard to provide the very best care. When patients receive care at Sutter Davis Hospital, they know that the team here really does care about their welfare and is doing the very best for them.”

SDH was recognized for its ratings concerning readmission rates and the average length of patient stays for pneumonia, heart failure and acute myocardial infarction. The hospital has also reduced its average emergency room wait time from 45 minutes in 2008 to 22 minutes in 2012.

The decision to implement the Baldrige criteria took many years of discussion, according to Wagner.

“We decided that using the Baldrige criteria was the best step to sustaining results and building a strong leadership framework for guiding patient care delivery,” she said.

The improvements made by implementing the Baldrige criteria have been a major benefit to hospital staff as well as patients served by SDH, Wagner said. In receiving the award, the hospital has gained a reaffirmed sense of pride in their decision to follow the nationally recognized criteria.

“It is a tremendous responsibility to be in a hospital, providing care to people,” Wagner said. “To be a recipient of the Baldrige — to have someone at that level acknowledge your leadership — is an overwhelming experience.”