Shared from weekly updates to staff
4/28/21
It’s been over a year now. The Quarantine Unit for potential COVID patients was operational by March 24, 2020.
We were the first unit of this kind in the entire nation (as best I can tell). The first COVID case in CO was diagnosed on March 5, hospitals in Washington state were starting to become overrun with patients in March, and as a hospital we were flexible enough to quickly adapt to this impending situation. Johns Hopkins created their psychiatric COVID unit in late April, and Yale soon thereafter.
Our neighbor hospitals (St. Mary’s, Community, Canyons, the VA) as well as hospitals in Vail, Aspen, Glenwood Springs, Montrose, Rifle, etc needed to have a reliable place to send psychiatric patients (whether with covid or without).
4/12/21
Our restraint numbers are about 0.02 hours/1000 total patient hours.
These numbers go up when (i) more patients require restraint or (ii) restraints are LINK OUT WHERE YOU NEED TO longer in time. They are reported to the government as “per 1000 patient hours” to allow for the fact that different hospitals have more or less patients who stay for more or less time. The national average is 0.38/1000. The Colorado state average is 0.77/1000.
We restrain patients less than 1/10th the average of other places. Trauma-informed care works. And we take some very challenging-to-treat patients.
4/5/21
Our 30 day re-hospitalization rate after discharge over the past 6 months has varied between 5% and 8.8%.
There was a national survey a couple years ago. The government keeps track of this statistic. It generally is a measure of ‘are patients improved enough that they don’t need to come back into the hospital again soon’. Psychiatric hospitals ranged from 8% (the best) to 30% (the worst) re-hospitalization rates.
We are doing better than the best did in that survey. Maybe a few others have improved since then. So I can’t state that we’re definitely number one. But I’m pretty sure that we are in the top 99% of hospitals.
