October 18, 2006

(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) — UC Davis Medical Center ranked among the nation's top 50 hospitals on the Leapfrog Hospital Quality and Safety Survey, a national rating system that offers a broad assessment of a hospital's quality and safety. Only eight hospitals in California made the elite list.

The voluntary survey gathered data from more than 1,200 urban, acute-care hospitals regarding their progress toward implementing 30 Leapfrog-recommended safe practices. The practices include staffing intensive care units with intensivists (physicians who have received advanced training in caring for patients in ICUs), following procedures to avoid wrong-site surgery (in which a surgery is performed on the wrong part of the body), and having pharmacists review all medication orders before drugs are given to patients.

“We took the Leapfrog safe practices goals very seriously and thought it very important that we measure up,” said Allan Siefkin, chief medical officer. “Over the past three years, since the safe practice standards were first established, we have assessed our performance on each of the standards and established teams to address each of the goals where we weren't scoring 100 percent. Our ranking in the top 50 hospitals reflects this hard work and our institution's strong safety culture.”

The Leapfrog Group, a Washington, D.C.-based health-care safety and quality coalition supported by many of the nation's largest corporations, did not rank hospitals in numerical order. Rather, the group reported the top 50 performers in alphabetical order.

UC Davis Health System has a strong track record of success in improving clinical care and in establishing a culture of clinical quality and patient safety. Additional recognition of these efforts includes:

• For the last eight years in a row, the National Research Corporation has recognized UC Davis Medical center with its Consumer Choice Award for best overall quality and reputation among all hospitals in the Sacramento region, based on consumer surveys.
  
  
• UC Davis is participating for the third year in the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality Safety Culture Survey coordinated by Stanford University. UC Davis is the only academic medical center examining interventions to change safety culture.
  
  
• The Integrated Healthcare Association ranked UC Davis Medical Group among the top 10 medical groups in 2005.
  
  
• UC Davis Medical Center ranked above the 95th percentile in 10 of 10 measures of hospitalized patient satisfaction on the 2004 Patient Expectation of Performance-California (PEP-CIII) survey.
  
  
• UC Davis Medical Center pioneered a medical incident reporting system that became a model for other University of California medical centers.
  
  
• UC Davis nurses pioneered the adoption of “primary care nursing” as the inpatient care delivery model to improve patient care and enhance satisfaction among patients and staff.
  
  
• UC Davis Health System is an active member of the National Quality Forum, with appointees on the executive steering committees for ambulatory care, deep vein thrombosis and additional project areas.

UC Davis Health System is an integrated, academic health system encompassing UC Davis School of Medicine, the 577-bed acute-care hospital and clinical services of UC Davis Medical Center, and the 800-member physician group known as UC Davis Medical Group.