‘Tree of Life’ Celebrates Organ Donation Heroes
The Tree of Life wall sculpture honors organ donation heroes. The 150-pound sculpture by artist Mendy Greenbaum is cast in bronze and installed in the Intensive Care Unit at Eden Medical Center.
Eden Medical Center dedicated the “Tree of Life” on Saturday, Feb. 2 and honored 23 heroes who gave the ultimate gift of life. The 150-pound sculpture stands 7 ft. by 7 ft., has 375 leaves and hangs on the wall of the waiting area of the Intensive Care Unit of the hospital. Each leaf will be engraved with the name of a patient who donated their organs to save another’s life. The first 23 leaves have been engraved with the names of patients who donated organs or tissue in 2011 and 2012. Their families were invited to a ceremony to honor this gift. Read More about ‘Tree of Life’ Celebrates Organ Donation Heroes
The Last Ride on Move Day
By Julie Ruiz-Wibbelsmann
(Photos courtesy of Terry Lorant Photography)
James Moore began servicing elevators at Eden Medical Center nearly 60 years ago. But when the new medical center opened Saturday, he took his last ride on the elevators in the old hospital—as a patient.
Known as “Big Jim” because he tops out above 6 feet tall, Mr. Moore began servicing elevators when he was just 17 years old. Read More about The Last Ride on Move Day
Castro Valley Medical Office Building Bustles with Preparation to Open Nov. 19
By Tom Berns
The Castro Valley Medical Office Building at 20101 Lake Chabot Road on the Eden Medical Center Campus received a temporary certificate of occupancy on Friday, Oct. 19.
The certificate allows a full month of access for fine-tuning the many tasks of outfitting and furnishing, systems testing, training and other pre-go live activities in preparation for seeing the first patients Monday, Nov. 19, 2012.
In addition, in recent weeks a comprehensive training program for clinicians and staff established under the leadership of Flora Maiki, project manager, will provide competencies in new systems, technologies and flow processes associated with the lean-designed clinic, lab and imaging environments.
New Urgent Care Will Offer Walk-In Convenience
By Rose Corcoran, vice president of patient care at Eden Medical Center
If you sprain your finger during your softball game or if your child suddenly develops an ear infection over the weekend, you will soon have a convenient and fast option for medical treatment: Eden Urgent Care.
When it opens in 2013, Eden Urgent Care will be the only urgent care center in the Castro Valley-Hayward-San Leandro area. Read More about New Urgent Care Will Offer Walk-In Convenience
Universal Care Unit: An Entirely New Patient Service
By Rose Corcoran, vice president patient care
Our Universal Care Unit (UCU) will offer a completely new patient care model by providing personalized care in private rooms for patients who do not require inpatient hospitalization yet still need care for several hours or overnight.
The Universal Care Unit (Level 02) is comprised of Diagnostic Testing, Peri Operative as well as the Observation Unit (see highlighted text with arrows).
When the new hospital opens on Dec. 1, we anticipate that Eden Medical Center will have the only Universal Care Unit in the East Bay licensed by the California Department of Public Health.
Who do we serve?
One primary reason for creating a Universal Care Unit is to better meet the needs of our patients. More and more patients today are cared for outside of hospitals, in outpatient facilities, mainly due to advances in technology such as minimally invasive surgeries.
At Eden, we offer many different types of minimally invasive procedures, such as knee and hip replacements, and back surgeries. Most are done on an outpatient basis, requiring a few hours of recovery or an overnight stay. These patients can avoid being admitted to the hospital by receiving care in our UCU, which is designed for patients who need care for 24 hours or less.
In addition to patients recovering from outpatient procedures, the UCU will care for patients who may need to be observed before going home as they recover from surgery and/or anesthesia for a few hours or overnight.
More efficient–and faster–care
Our 34-bed Universal Care Unit also will serve patients from the Emergency Department and Trauma Center who are not experiencing life-threatening conditions, but who need further observation, diagnostic testing/evaluation, or monitoring for a few hours or overnight.
By caring for these patients in the UCU, patients with critical care needs in the ED will be treated much sooner, increasing the efficiency of patient flow. In this way, the UCU will expedite care throughout the hospital by improving patient outcomes and reducing the length of stay.
Continuum of care
In our Universal Care Center, patients and their records will no longer move to a different room to receive a different level of care as their care needs change. Patients will stay in the same private room and different providers will come to their room to care for them. By eliminating patient transfers, our UCU will increase patient safety and comfort, while still delivering high quality care.
In addition, UCU patients will be cared for by an inpatient hospitalist who is available 24/7, and every room will have the capability to be monitored. By decentralizing our nursing stations, we will offer more personalized care for our patients and a better nurse-to-patient ratio with a higher number of nurses caring for each patient.
Keeping our UCU patients in the same private room will create a healing environment for them and their family members, who will be able to stay at the bedside of their loved one. Providing a safe and comfortable environment for patients and their families, our UCU promises to increase quality outcomes, enhance patient safety, and promote healing.
Process Redesign: Now and for our Future Hospital
A look at how Operational Process Redesign is changing how we work and is improving the hospital experience
by Cassandra Clark, Project Communications Director
With only 13 months remaining before our anticipated move-in date, Eden Medical Center is intensively planning every aspect of the transition. But moving into a new hospital doesn’t mean taking with us all of our old systems and ways of doing work. Our employees, physicians and hospital leaders are taking a whole new look at our work processes with the goal to better support the hospital’s mission and improve the way we care for patients – now and in the future.
Our Process Redesign experts do more than look at a specific task. They examine the entire process of providing a service to a person. The employees, physicians and managers performing these tasks are the experts who focus on re-designing the process as a whole in order to achieve the greatest possible benefits to the hospital and ultimately for our patients. The goal is to realize dramatic improvements by fundamentally re-thinking how the organization’s work should be done, rather than focusing on just one specific task improvement.
Leading Eden’s Process Redesign effort is Shelly Young, RN, MHA, CNOR. We sat down with Shelly to learn more about the work she’s doing at Eden.
Shelly Young, RN, MHA, CNOR
Q. Tell us about you.
I have totally embraced Lean and Six Sigma, what we call Operational Process Redesign, because it provides a way to help groups of people from all areas of the hospital solve their own problems in a way that works for everyone.
During my years as a Registered Nurse in the operating room, people who didn’t understand my job were dictating how to care for patients without consideration of how the work was accomplished, often making the work harder. Hoping to facilitate what I thought should be “dictated,” I went back to school. Then, as a member of administration, I still found physicians or patients unhappy with the admin-driven processes. Now, as a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, I can help develop effective, helpful solutions by coaching teams of people who do the work and know how it will fit into their existing processes.
Q. What do you want people to know about Process Redesign?
It works! It really works! Using a scientific approach to solving problems, in a way that brings together representatives from each role in a process, we come up with solutions that would not have been discovered any other way. People with different roles in the hospital sit down and solve problems together.
Q. What do you want from employees?
Participation. I want ALL employees to participate. We need employees at the table because they are the experts at their jobs. The people who do the work are very aware of the things that don’t work for them in their everyday work processes, and they often have great ideas for making it better.
Q. What’s the best lesson you have learned?
The smallest, simplest fixes can make the biggest difference. The simplest solutions will improve a process throughout the entire hospital. It doesn’t have to cost a lot of money or require big staffing changes to make a better process. We just have to organize ourselves to be more efficient to get care to patients in a healthy and safe way and, at the same time, create an ideal work environment for staff and physicians.
Q. What do you want to achieve here at Eden?
I want to help Eden employees understand how to make this difference. We care about our patients, about humanity and the future of health care. If we can create something at Eden that works for us, it can serve as a model that can work anywhere else in the country. We could change health care! It’s so simple. We don’t always have to spend millions of dollars in equipment to manage the process, we just have to listen to the people who do the work and remove everyday obstacles that keep them from getting their jobs done. Simple solutions will help us all be better prepared to move into our new, state-of-the art hospital.
I love what I do. I love making a difference for people I don’t even know. I’m excited to share this awareness that process redesign is not rocket science. Some solutions are very simple, some are huge, but most important, those solution come from a team of people who are involved in the work. It’s what sets Eden Medical Center apart and above.
Stay tuned: We’ll take a closer look at some of the Process Redesign teams in progress and follow their success over the next year.
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