Subject
Humans; Leadership; Length of Stay; Program Development; Outcome Assessment (Health Care); Patient Satisfaction; Hospitals; Catholicism; Palliative Care/organization & administration; Family/psychology; Midwestern United States; Hospice Care/standards; Hospital Restructuring; Institutional Management Teams; Multi-Institutional Systems/organization & administration; Multi-Institutional Systems/standards; Palliative Care/standards; Practice Guidelines as Topic; Religious/organization & administration; Religious/standards; Total Quality Management/organization & administration
Description
Large-scale change techniques and rapid redesign methodologies were used to improve the quality of care delivered to patients at the end of life in a large, multihospital healthcare delivery system. By bringing key stakeholders from across the system together at a symposium to formulate the vision and critical criteria for palliative care programs, as well as to develop a flexible set of design tools, each region in the system could respond to the unique needs of its own community. Hospice length of stay for the system improved by 100% in the year after the systemwide symposium.
2002