Sebasticook Valley Hospital (SVH) President and CEO John C. May has announced that the hospital’s performance on its unannounced Joint Commission survey has once again earned its Joint Commission (JC) accreditation effective September 17, 2009. The Joint Commission survey cycles are customarily valid for up to thirty-nine months.
The Joint Commission is the nation’s predominant standards-setting and accrediting body in healthcare. Since 1951, it has offered state-of-the-art professional-based study and evaluation, measuring compliance of healthcare organizations against established benchmarks. Based in Oakbrook, Illinois, with a satellite office in Washington, D.C., the Joint Commission surveys thousands of healthcare organizations across the United States. The mission of the Joint Commission is "…to continuously improve the safety and quality of care provided to the public through the provision of health care accreditation and related services that support performance improvement in healthcare organizations."
The Joint Commission looks at key functional areas such as patient rights, patient treatment, infection prevention and control and a host of other operational issues that help ensure patient safety and continually improving quality care. The standards are developed in consultation with healthcare experts, providers of care, measurement experts, purchasers, and consumers of healthcare. Accreditation requires an unannounced survey every three years with hospital laboratories surveyed every two years.
The Joint Commission accreditation of SVH covers all services offered at the hospital, and at all four Sebasticook Regional Family Care primary care offices in Carmel, Clinton, Newport, Pittsfield, Rehabilitation Service locations in Pittsfield and Newport, and Eastern Maine Urology Services based in Detroit. For more information, contact Sharon E. King, RHIT, CPHQ, Director of Performance Improvement and Health Information Management at 487-4028 or TTY at 487-4590. |
|
