green ribbon

The Cypress Health Region staff members involved in the Green Ribbon award-winning projects take part in a presentation at the Swift Current Care Centre Thursday morning.

The Cypress Health Region was a big winner at this year's Inspire Health Care Quality Summit, winning three of the four Green Ribbon awards, and a Green Ribbon honourable mention at the conference.

The winning projects were the "Meals R Us" project in the category of Improvement Behind the Scenes, the Improving Communication Bedside Reporting project in the Patient/Family Centred Care category, and the Cypress Expedition in the Leading in Quality category. The honourable mention was for the region's Employee Staffing Strategy.

"We do these things because these are the right things to do, and we don't do it for awards and recognition, but it is really nice to have our staff recognized and acknowledged for the teriffic work that they are doing," said Health Region CEO Beth Vachon. "Some of what we've done is groundbreaking, it hasn't been done before. They've really looked at what the needs are within their own programs, and determined how they can make it better."

"Meals R Us" was started at the Swift Current Care Centre with a target to decrease wait times for breakfast and increase overall food temperatures. The initiative resulted in an 86% decrease in wait times.

"We have dedicated this award for our residents. It's all about them," said Pat Olmstead, Manager of Nutrition and Food Services for the Health Region. "We wanted to make sure we changed our focus from being a medical model to a social model, and making sure that we put our residents first and foremost and what their needs were, and what we could do for them... Starting breakfast earlier rather than having them wait so long until 8:30am has been huge, so  as they come out, they have their breakfast served to them. It's more home-like and less institutional."

The Improving Communication Bedside Reporting project at the Cypress Regional Hospital's Women and Children's unit looked to increase patient satisfaction by improving communication during staffing shift changes.

"We've realized that our communication with our patients was not very good according to the provincial surveys," said Carol Dyck, the unit's Nursing Co-ordinator. "Since we've started this, it's been two years now, we've improved our communication up to 86%, and the patients absolutely love being part of the report and it makes them part of the team. Before it was just nurses meeting in a room and discussing the care of a patient. This way we go out to the bedside and the patients are part of their care, and the families have a say in what's happening, they know all the team that's looking after them, and I think it gives them a better perspective on what's going on in their care, and I think they get better faster because they're part of it."

The Cypress Expedition was a partnership between the health Region and the Health Quality Council that saw a series of dashboard performance indicators posted on a public website.

"The rest of the province is taking notice of how we're moving forward in our journey of transparency," said Beth Adashynski, the Health Region's Executive Director of Quality Assurance. "The time has come where people need to hold us accountable for the work that we are doing, and we need to be transparent. We need to give them the information, and they need to ask the questions."

The region's Employee Staffing Strategy, which was an honourable mention in the Improvement Behind the Scenes category, involved ways to reduce the amount of overtime, worker's compensation claims and sick time that was used within the region. The program helped the health region become a leader in reducing overtime hours and WCB claims, and surpassed sick time targets established by the Ministry of Health.

Fourteen projects across the province were submitted for the Green Ribbon awards, which were presented at the Inspire Conference held this week in Saskatoon.