Finalists announced for 2008 CHEQA award
Record number of organizations vie for patient safety award
Tuesday October 7, 2008 -- Jason Thompson
Five finalists have been selected from a record number of submissions for the 2008 Canadian Healthcare Excellence in Quality Award (CHEQA).

A record 32 entries, up from 19 in 2007, were submitted for consideration for CHEQA, Canada's premiere healthcare award which recognizes excellence in quality of care and patient safety.

“Patient safety has definitely been placed on the radar,” says Tanya Flanagan, director of communications and media relations with the Quality Healthcare Network (QHN) which is sponsoring the award with rL Solutions, a provider of healthcare quality and safety software.

Flanagan credits the Canadian Patient Safety Institute and its Safer Healthcare Now campaign with helping increase patient safety efforts in Canada.

“A lot of the submissions I was hearing about are actually tied to Safer Healthcare Now (SHN) which is no longer a campaign but more of a mainstay in organizations throughout the country,” Flanagan says, suggesting this may also be related to the spike in CHEQA submissions this year.

Every hospital and healthcare organization in Canada that provides acute care, long-term care, rehabilitation, mental health, complex continuing care, and/or community care is eligible for award.

Entries were submitted over the summer and whittled down to five finalists by an awards committee.

The finalists are:

• Grand River Hospital in Kitchener for its cancer centre systemic wait time reduction project
• Kelowna General Hospital for achieving a ventilator-associated pneumonia rate of zero
• North York General Hospital in Toronto for its project entitled, “Patient Flow: Improving the Patient Experience”
• Winnipeg Children's Hospital for its implementation of a pediatric rapid response team
• Winnipeg Children's Hospital for reducing the rate of central venous line blood stream infections in the pediatric intensive care unit

QHN members are encouraged to go online over the next couple of weeks to read about the various projects and vote for which one merits the $15,000 top prize.

The winner will be announced during the Halifax 8 Conference in Winnipeg scheduled for October 23 – 25.

Click here for more information on the finalists or to cast a vote for the award winner.

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