Happy National Healthcare Food Service Week! This week, we celebrate the incredible dedication and hard work of our healthcare food service professionals. You play a vital role in ensuring that our patients receive nutritious and delicious meals, contributing to their overall well-being and recovery.
When that call for help comes, Intermountain Life Flight emergency responders must be ready. Spend the day with our Life Flight team and see firsthand what a "flying ICU" is like in the KSL 5 TV story below.
Dedicating his life to the service of others, Dr. Rob Ferguson, Intermountain Health Peaks Region chief medical officer, and his wife, Andrea, founded Amanaki Fo'ou in 2014. Amanaki Fo'ou (Tongan for “A New Hope”) is an organization dedicated to eliminating diabetes among indigenous populations. Learn more about how Dr. Ferguson's family's crusade against diabetes is empowering communities through education and service in the article below.
Vanessa Kibble is the nutrition services manager at Park City Hospital in Park City, Utah, and has been there for four years. She oversees a team of caregivers who directly interact with patients; ensures all room service (patient meals) are properly handled; and manages the cafes, bistros, and catering as well. Vanessa also rounds throughout the week and prioritizes connecting with patients who may have a tough time ordering meals or are on restricted (therapeutic) diets. She often walks them through meeting both the therapeutic diet orders and finding a meal to satisfy them. Vanessa is also a highly skilled chef with an incredible resume. But according to her family, becoming a chef was not an option. In fact, when Vanessa decided to become a chef, she snuck off to Europe to go to culinary school. After finishing school, she worked her way into Gordon Ramsay’s restaurant in London's prestigious Claridge’s Hotel. She eventually made her way to Utah and owned her own restaurant before landing at Intermountain Health. We caught up with her to discuss her transition from restaurants to healthcare, her approach to working with patients, how she handles meeting medical needs and patient food requests, and her decision to become a chef.
When it became clear that a patient at Layton Hospital in Layton, Utah wasn't able to care for his beloved black Lab, Ashley Bailey, emergency department RN coordinator, stepped forward with a solution — she adopted the dog and took her home that day.
Congratulations to the following 8 Intermountain Health hospitals for being recognized by Vizient with the Bernard A. Birnbaum, MD, Quality Leadership Award for 2024! Top perfomers in the comprehensive academic medical center cohort: ✔️ Intermountain Medical Center - Murray, Utah Top performers in the large, specialized complex care medical center cohort: ✔️ McKay-Dee Hospital - Ogden, Utah ✔️ St. George Regional Hospital - St. George, Utah ✔️ Utah Valley Hospital - Provo, Utah Top performers in the community hospital cohort: ✔️ Alta View Hospital - Sandy, Utah ✔️ Cedar City Hospital - Cedar City, Utah ✔️ Layton Hospital - Layton, Utah ✔️ Riverton Hospital - Riverton, Utah The Bernard A. Birnbaum, MD, Quality Leadership Award recognizes participating healthcare organizations in four cohorts through the Vizient Quality and Accountability Study, which measures performance on the quality of patient care in six domains: safety, mortality, effectiveness, efficiency, patient centeredness and equity. The study factors in measures from the Vizient Clinical Data Base and includes performance data from the HCAHPS survey and the CDC's National Healthcare Safety Network.
It’s no secret care management caregivers have compassionate hearts and a drive to help those in need. Learn how Eva Hobson, LCSW, works with patients who present in crisis or require behavioral health intervention
A small crowd gathered in the lobby of Select Health’s Utah headquarters, individuals exchanging shy smiles and greetings as they slowly “put a face to the name” they’d come to know so well via email. It was “Select Health Day” for Select Health Scholarship recipients to meet their Select Health mentor in person and take a tour. The experience aimed to educate and support Select Health’s scholarship beneficiaries but would prove to exceed expectations. The scholarship recipients, students at Salt Lake Community College (SLCC), all have one thing in common: a goal to overcome personal financial challenges and enter the healthcare workforce to make a difference for their communities. To this end, Select Health invests $5,000 in each selected student with demonstrated financial need, to cover tuition, and help make their career dream a reality.
Our caregivers save lives across the Intermountain Health system every day. What does it actually feel like to save a life? Three caregivers share their experiences and the incredible ways their intuition, training, and compassion made the difference between life and death.
At the end of May, the Central Microbiology Lab’s average turnaround was at 85 hours. For teams at St. George, where specimens had to be received by the onsite lab, processed and only then sent four hours by courier to the Central Lab to be tested, the entire wait could stretch out close to five days. Meanwhile, teams at Central Microbiology were pulling 12- and 13-hour days just to stay afloat. That kind of volume – from hospitals all over the Canyons and Desert Regions – can quickly turn into a bottleneck. That’s why, in 2019, Intermountain Health invested in an automated line to take over the job of streaking cultures and incubating them under the correct conditions to grow as quickly as possible. When this turnaround time issue was escalated through our huddle process,” said Karen Brownell, vice president of laboratory services, “it was escalated to me.” Karen brought in continuous improvement. Learn more about how our continuous improvement team partnered to identify opportunities to increase efficiency and eliminate waste in both the Central Lab and the lab at St. George in the article below.
