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🥳 Happy National Pediatric Hematology/Oncology Nurses Day! 🥳 Today, we celebrate your incredible dedication and compassion as you care for children and families facing cancer and blood disorders. Thank you for your unwavering commitment to improving the lives of your patients, each and every day!
The Health Care Headliners awards recognize some of the best researchers and health care providers in Southern Nevadan medicine, and we're proud to announce that our very own Robert Vadovic, Community-Based Programs and Program Director for the Primary Care APP Fellowship Program, was recognized as one of nine honorees in 2023! Recently, Vadovic had the opportunity to present two lectures at the American Association of Nurse Practitioners’ annual conference where he discussed the topics of mentorship and population health. Vadovic is an advocate for continuing education for providers and is a member of the Intermountain Health Nevada Clinical Education Committee. This committee was responsible for establishing the 90-Day Medical Assistant program, which creates career opportunities in underserved areas while alleviating staffing shortages. Vadovic himself practices what he teaches and is currently pursing his masters in health administration. Local students also have the opportunity to benefit from Vadovic’s guidance and mentorship. He is a community partner with the UNLV School of Nursing. Every year he works with Intermountain Health to provide stethoscopes to incoming nursing students. He also serves as a mentor for UNLV’s senior-level nursing students. Additionally, Vadovic is an adjunct professor and guest lecturer at Touro University and is a former instructor for the Red Cross.
We're proud to be recognized on Forbes' list of America's Best Employers by State in 2023! Forbes partnered with market research firm Statista to survey 70,000 workers at companies (minimum of 500 employees) in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Participants were asked if they would recommend their employer to others, and to evaluate their employer based on working conditions, diversity, compensation packages, potential for development, company image and more. Participants also assessed employers beyond their own. All surveys were anonymous to encourage candor. A special thank you to all of our Intermountain caregivers for helping us fulfill our mission of helping people live the healthiest lives possible each and every day!
In our continuing effort to conserve water and other natural resources, we've made an innovative upgrade of two industrial washing machines at the Intermountain Central Laundry facility in North Salt Lake, saving millions of gallons of water. After a year of use, the new machines, which were set to be replaced, saved more than 11 million gallons of water, and those numbers are only expected to grow in the future. Intermountain’s Central Laundry handles the cleaning of linens from 160 healthcare and hospital facilities stretching from Burley, Idaho, to Delta, Utah. Caregivers clean, fold, and deliver more than 1.3 million pounds of laundry every month. Water conservation is at the forefront of Intermountain’s sustainability efforts in Utah and other Western states, which are working to find innovative ways to deal with record droughts and dwindling water levels in lakes and reservoirs.
Congratulations to our cardiovascular teams at Intermountain Medical Center in Murray, UT for being recognized as one of the best hospitals for heart attack survival! Intermountain Medical Center tied with Rochester, Minn.-based Mayo Clinic Hospital and New York City-based NYU Langone Hospitals for the lowest death rate for heart attack patients in the country, according to CMS data. Thank you to our caregivers for the outstanding work they do to treat our patients with life-threatening conditions!
Caring for patients in hospice can cover a wide range of emotional events. Sometimes, they can even be celebrations. Case in point – Kris Prahl, a Patient Care Tech on our Lutheran Hospice team in Wheat Ridge, CO, learned that one of her patients was having a birthday soon – her 101st! Kris crafted a huge birthday card and asked many of her colleagues to sign it with birthday wishes. She bought a pint of the patient’s favorite ice cream – chocolate chip cookie dough. Here’s what happened next, according to Kris: “When I went for my visit on Friday the 18th and brought in the card, her eyes just lit up and got so big, she just about started to cry. She was very thankful for the card and the ice cream. She even said that this was the best birthday she ever had.” Thank you, Kris, for making this patient feel special, for showing her kindness all day, every day, and for living our core values!
Happy National Clinical Nurse Specialist Recognition Week! We want to take this opportunity to recognize and celebrate the invaluable contributions our Clinical Nurse Specialists bring to Intermountain. Thank you for all you do to improve patient outcomes and advance the nursing profession!
It's not too late to join us for our upcoming Primary Children's Hospital Miller Campus hiring event! Date: Wednesday, September 6th, 2023 Time: 1pm - 5pm MT Location: Amber Room at Thanksgiving Point (inside the Museum of Ancient Life), 2929 N Thanksgiving Way, Lehi, UT 84043 We currently have open positions in the following areas: Child Life, Environmental Services/Housekeeping, Food Services, Imaging, Medical Assistants, Patient Care Techs, Pharmacy, Registered Nurses, Respiratory Therapy, Security, and Supply Chain. We hope to see you there!
On the evening of Aug. 3, Alta View Hospital was hit by a severe thunderstorm that triggered flooding on all three floors of the care site and caused the neighboring city of Draper to declare a state of emergency. Summer Jones, the nursing house supervisor, jumped into action and began to triage the situation. Summer followed her training and called Janet Hintze, Alta View’s chief nursing officer, the administrator on call, who soon became the incident command officer during the emergency. When Janet arrived at the hospital, it was immediately clear that patients might need to be moved. Every unit in the hospital was affected directly or indirectly by the flood. Facility manager Ben Scholes coordinated with teams from other hospitals, and with Intermountain’s system emergency response team, to get systems up and running quickly. The environmental services team worked overnight to clean the actual labor and delivery rooms so that they could be re-opened as quickly as possible (on the first day back in service, the L&D team saw a full load of patients, including a C-section.) Janet said the positive attitude shown by caregivers helped make the ordeal easier for patients, and for the caregivers themselves. The womens’ center team had the good humor to create onesies for the new moms involved that read, “Born during the Alta View flood of August 2023.” One family member of a patient even remarked that it was “kind of cool” to deliver during a disaster scenario.
St. Mary's Medical Center in Grand Junction, CO, now part of Intermountain Health, now employs three full-time and two part-time K-9 teams which include a dog and a handler. The dogs and their handlers undergo formal training for months before starting at the hospital. Unlike traditional police dogs, in addition to security, they also are trained to be approachable and provide comfort to patients and staff. “Their main job when they come to work is to patrol and be seen. That visibility is the number one value of the program and the deterrence that it provides. But they are also used to provide comfort to our associates after they’ve worked a difficult case or even to ease a patient who might be experiencing anxiety from being in the hospital,” said Susan Bourgeois, interim director of Public Safety and Security in the Peaks Region of Intermountain Health. Healthcare settings can be a stressful environment, and workers across the country are increasingly seeing patients and visitors act out. As a result, healthcare workers are at an increased risk of experiencing verbal threats or physical attacks. St. May’s K-9 team provides a visual deterrent to these behaviors and can help deescalate potential harmful situations, and according to Bourgeois, since implementing the K-9 program St. Mary’s has seen a reduction in workplace violence injuries by 50%.
