Adventist Health hospitals in Hanford and Reedley are among only 10 hospitals in California to earn 2019 Top Teaching Hospital accolades for patient safety and quality.
The award is from The Leapfrog Group, a national watchdog organization of employers and other purchasers focused on healthcare safety and quality and is widely acknowledged as one of the most competitive honors American hospitals can receive.
Only 118 hospitals earned Top Hospital awards, which include the following categories:
Top Children’s Hospitals
Top General Hospitals
Top Rural Hospitals
Top Teaching Hospitals
Adventist Health’s Top Teaching award for Hanford and Reedley highlights the hospitals’ family medicine residency training programs at Adventist Health Medical Office – Hanford Family Medicine Residency and Adventist Health Medical Office – Reedley Cypress.
Each program serves 12 residents, or physicians in training, each year.
Adventist Health Hanford is the sponsoring institution for the Hanford Family Medicine Residency Program, which trains four new residents a year during all three years of the program.
Adventist Health Reedley also hosts four family medicine residents for their three years of training at the Reedley Cypress medical office and provides valuable educational experiences in newborn care and obstetrics for all 39 University of California San Francisco – Fresno family medicine residents.
The programs expose the residents to healthcare in rural areas.
“The benefit of residency programs to our communities is the increased access to providers, many of whom are bilingual,” says Dr. John Zweifler, medical director for Clinical Integration and Graduate Medical Education for Adventist Health in the Central Valley. “As physicians, we also appreciate the residents’ expertise when seeking second opinions regarding patient care.”
The Top Teaching Hospital award comes just one month after Adventist Health Hanford and Adventist Health Selma were awarded A grades in patient safety, also from The Leapfrog Group.
“Our teams are constantly focused on improving care, safety and quality; and our residencies are an important part of that,” says Andrea Kofl, president of Adventist Health in the Central Valley. “Resident physicians learn on the leading edges of medicine, and our patients and team benefit from their insights and perspectives.”
Performance across many areas of hospital care is considered in establishing the qualifications for the Top Teaching Hospital award, including infection rates, practices for safer surgery, maternity care and the hospital’s capacity to prevent medication errors. The rigorous standards are defined in each year’s Top Hospital Methodology.
To qualify for the Top Hospitals distinction, hospitals must rank top among peers in the 2019 Leapfrog Hospital Survey, which assesses hospital performance on the highest known standards for quality and patient safety, and achieve top performance in its category.
The full list of institutions honored as 2019 Top Hospitals is available at www.leapfroggroup.org/tophospitals.