Highlights
- St. Louise Regional Hospital has been named to the State of California’s Patient Safety and Maternity Honor Rolls.
- The hospital has demonstrated a strong culture of safety across multiple departments and continues to provide high quality care to patients.
- Reducing cesarean sections (c-sections) can result in lowering medical complications in first time mothers such as incidents of heavy bleeding, blood transfusions, infections, blood clots, and longer recovery time compared with vaginal birth. Higher c-section rates carry risks for babies including potential injury during surgery, breathing problems, neonatal intensive care stays, and lower breastfeeding rates.
December 20, 2019-Santa Clara County, CA. – St. Louise Regional Hospital made the State of California’s Patient Safety Honor Roll for demonstrating a strong culture of safety across multiple departments. Last week the hospital made the state’s Maternity Honor Roll for meeting or surpassing a statewide target aimed at reducing births via c-section in first-time mothers with low-risk pregnancies.
“We are proud to be on both Honor Rolls. It takes a team effort and our physicians, nurses and support staff are committed to meeting rigorous performance measures for our patients’ safety,” commented Gloria Dela Merced, RN, St. Louise Regional Hospital Executive.
The Patient Safety Honor Roll evaluates hospitals to determine high performing hospitals. Evaluating patient safety is complex there is no single validated method for measuring overall safety in a healthcare setting. The Patient Safety Honor Roll measures include hospital acquired infections, adverse patient safety events, sepsis management, and patient experience.
These measurements are foundational to establishing shared goals and sense of purpose, and to advancing improvements. St. Louis Regional Hospital has demonstrated a strong culture of safety, provides high quality care to patients, and showed its ability to meet the state’s patient safety measures.
The Maternity Honor Roll’s goal is to reduce cesarean rates in California. There are 500,000 births each year in California (one-eighth of all US births) and in the past decade, the c-section birth rate has risen by 50% nationwide. Today, one-third of all babies are born via surgery — significantly more than the federal Healthy People 2020 goal of 24.7% for low-risk deliveries. This upward trend is seen across all demographics.
Overuse of c-sections matters because, while often lifesaving in limited circumstances, the surgery also brings serious risks for babies and mothers. Also, once a mother has had a c-section, she has a greater than 90% chance of having the procedure for subsequent births — leading to higher risks of major complications, such as hysterectomy and uterine rupture.
Contact: Joy Alexiou
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