“Our goal is to be the leader in patient satisfaction for the care we deliver,” says Lee’s Summit Medical Center Chief Executive Officer Jackie DeSouza. “Achieving a number one ranking for our stroke patient care is a wonderful accomplishment, and we are very proud of Lee’s Summit Medical Center doctors, nurses and staff who make this happen.”
The ranking comes from the first national, standardized and publicly reported survey of patient perspectives of hospital care, the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems survey, or HCAHPS.
HCAPHS surveys discharged patients in a list of questions about recent hospital experiences, including questions about doctor and nurse communication, responsiveness of hospital staff and cleanliness and quietness of the hospital environment.
The questions are based on data collected by Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, both of whom are agencies of the federal Department of Health and Human Services.
When treating stroke patients, Dr. Kathryn Hedges, a neurologist and medical director of LSMC stroke program, said time is of the essence. That’s why the hospital maintains a stroke team, available at a moment’s notice, that includes a stroke nurse, CT scan radiology technician, laboratory staff for blood testing, radiology technician for chest X-rays, and ER nurses and physicians.
A patient must arrive within four and a half hours of having an ischemic stroke in order for the clot-busting "tissue plasminogen activator" or t-PA, to work. Any time beyond that window, the patient must be sent to a larger facility that is equipped for retrieval procedures for clot removal.
Of the care patients receive at Lee's, Dr. Hedges remarked, “We have worked diligently over the last five years on every piece of making a stroke patient’s stay better. That can range from nursing knowledge to emergency department thoroughness to food. We look at everything on a monthly basis and ask, ‘How can we do better?’”
In addition to their number one ranking in stroke care patient satisfaction, Lee's Summit received a Gold Plus Award for stroke care earlier this year from the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association's Get with the Guidelines program, recognizing hospitals for consistently following evidence-based treatment guidelines.