Quality and Safety at UI Stead Family Children's Hospital
We measure the quality of your care by how well we meet your expectations and the highest national standards of safety and effectiveness.
Where you go does matter, and we strive to provide your child with care that is:
Avoiding injuries from treatments or therapies your child receives.
Reducing potentially harmful delays in the care your child receives as well as wait times for you and other caregivers.
Providing care that will help your child recover from illness or injury, and refraining from care that does not provide proven benefits.
Avoiding any misuse of time, equipment, supplies, ideas, and energy.
Providing care that does not vary in quality because of your child’s gender, ethnicity, geographic location, or socioeconomic status.
Providing care that respects your preferences, needs, and values and ensures that your values guide all clinical decisions.
How Our Quality Is Evaluated
We partner with several regional and national agencies to make sure that we deliver quality care to our patients. We are held to high standards by government agencies such as Medicare and Medicaid and by national accrediting bodies such as The Joint Commission, the nation's leading accrediting body in health care.
We also submit quality statistics to groups such as Hospital Compare and the Iowa Healthcare Collaborative so that our current and future patients can determine where our care stands compared to other hospitals and health systems in our region and across the nation.
How We're Doing
National agencies help us compare our performance to our peers on key practice measures involving care for:
- Children's asthma care
- Immunization measures
- Perinatal care
- Sepsis
We also ask our patients and their families to tell us how we're doing. These patient satisfaction surveys tell us what we’re doing well and how we can improve our care and service.
Your Role in Assuring Quality
You and your family members are key advocates for your child’s safe and effective care. Please feel free to ask questions, and let us know if you would like more information or a clearer explanation from your care team members.
Frequently Asked Questions
Access to quality care measurements can help you better understand the various measures of health care quality and help you make more informed choices. Conversely, hospitals that collect, share, and compare quality data can potentially use the information to improve their systems of care.
Indicators include:
- Thorough attention to patient safety
- Continuous improvement in clinical performance
- Experience in treating a particular patient condition
- Exceptional patient care outcomes
- High levels of patient satisfaction
Other factors include:
- Clinical research, that gives patients access to the latest treatments or technologies
- A teaching environment where medical students and physicians-in-training contribute curiosity and fresh thinking at the patient’s bedside
Since quality care can mean different things to different people, there may not be a single answer. For most people, quality care is simply getting the best care possible. This means having a good relationship with your physician; receiving your care in a timely, efficient fashion; getting your questions answered clearly and quickly; and feeling satisfied with the care you receive.
No system of measurement can guarantee a successful outcome in each individual case. For instance, there will always be elements of a patient’s condition that may not yet be known to the provider and which may affect the treatment outcome.
In that sense, measuring quality health care is more complicated than measuring the quality of a manufactured product like an automobile, for example. However, quality data can serve to reassure consumers that a hospital has high standards, and that the likelihood of a positive outcome there is high.
People often ask their friends and neighbors how they felt about their clinic visit or hospital stay. While there is nothing wrong with this, it may place too much emphasis on one experience and individual perception.
A more accurate measure may be found in the results of patient satisfaction surveys, which reflect the opinions of many people, not just a few.
The level of satisfaction expressed by patients following a clinic visit or hospital stay is one of the most useful measures of health care quality. The combined experiences of many people over time can more accurately reflect what a future patient may expect.
UI Hospitals & Clinics regularly conducts patient surveys to help assess strengths, identify opportunities for improvement, and compare our satisfaction scores with other institutions’ scores. Our surveys are managed by Press Ganey, a leading survey firm. Press Ganey’s measurement tools and consulting expertise have helped us develop the newest innovations in health care quality and patient satisfaction.