Quality and Safety
The safety of patients, families and employees is very important to us at Cook Children's. Providing safe, quality care is a key component of our Promise to improve the health of every child we serve.
Our chief quality officer leads a team that oversees quality and safety processes and procedures to ensure that our entire health care system is performing at the highest level possible. The team gathers data from every department and tracks outcomes based on a set of predetermined quality and safety goals. This helps us to identify where we're making great strides and where we can make improvements.
Cook Children's Medical Center and Cook Children's Home Health comply with the highest national standards for safety and quality of care to repeatedly receive The Joint Commission's Gold Seal of Approval.
Cook Children's has also been named numerous times to the elite Leapfrog Top Hospitals list based on a national comprehensive quality and safety survey.
Cook Children's goal is to provide the highest quality patient care, in the safest possible environment, where the best possible outcomes are our top priority. Because patients and families are always at the forefront of everything we do, we focus on 5 key patient perspectives:
- Keep me from harm
- Heal me
- Treat me with respect
- Help me find the right care at the right time and place
- Keep my community healthy
To meet these expectations, we focus on many quality initiatives to ensure we are providing the safest level of care. We continually track and measure data related to these key areas so that we can identify opportunities to improve care and processes. We strive to keep all children from harm and will continue to make safety our number one priority. Our goal is to reach Zero Harm, and our commitment to this is 100 percent.
Key quality measures
Quality care is key in our promise to improve the health of every child through the prevention and treatment of illness, disease and injury. In this section, we present data we collect in several important areas across pediatric primary care. Here are some of the key quality measures we look at:
- Appropriate Testing for Children with Pharyngitis
- Appropriate Treatment for Children with Upper Respiratory Infection
- Tobacco Use and Help with Quitting Among Adolescents
- Weight Assessment and Counseling for Nutrition and Physical Activity for Children and Adolescents
The Joint Commission Accreditation
The Joint Commission (TJC) is widely known for its leadership role in evaluating and accrediting thousands of healthcare organizations in the United States. Cook Children's Medical Center achieved a three-year accreditation by Joint Commission for September 2018 through September 2021 for both Hospital and Behavioral Health Care Programs. This accreditation means that we demonstrated compliance with applicable Joint Commission standards in all performance areas. TJC will conduct unannounced survey every three years to validation ongoing compliance with all requirements.