St. Christopher's Hospital Recognized with Two Gold Healthcare Innovation Awards

Patient Safety and Medical Education Programs Recognized

St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children was recognized in the Philadelphia Business Journal Healthcare Innovation Awards competition, which honored health care institutions and individuals who are pushing the region forward in the field of medicine.

St. Christopher’s received a Gold Patient Safety Award for the Hospital’s initiative to improve patient safety by changing the way faculty and staff review patient cases requiring improvement. Dr. David Cooperberg, a hospitalist at St. Christopher’s, developed a new way of examining cases that encourages multidisciplinary participation and the assessment of systems rather than of individual caregivers. The new monthly “Patient Safety Conference” was implemented to generate actionable improvements in patient safety and has sparked 20 safety initiatives in the past year, many of which have been implemented, including standardized asthma education.

Pediatric critical care attending Dr. Paul Shore received a Gold Medical Education Innovator Award for his commitment to enhancing and improving the training of future physicians. Dr. Shore led the development of a systems-based, multidisciplinary quality improvement initiative in the Hospital’s Section of Critical Care, which has led to major enhancements among its pediatric residents. Residents worked in groups to identify quality improvement ideas that were implemented and assessed. As a result, St. Christopher’s is working to publish a quality improvement study for pediatric residencies, which could lead to this unique curriculum being implemented in other pediatric residency programs. 

Since 1875, St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children has been providing exceptional patient care and advancing new pediatric treatments through research and innovation. Through affiliations with Drexel University College of Medicine and Temple University School of Medicine, St. Christopher’s is a teaching hospital helping to train the next generation of professionals in pediatric medicine.

The 189-bed hospital is committed to delivering high quality family- and patient-centered care to children from throughout the Philadelphia area and around the world. Its highly acclaimed programs include its Level I Pediatric Trauma Center; Level IIIC NICU, which is the highest NICU designation; Heart Center, Oncology/Transplant; as well as its Burn Center, which is the only dedicated pediatric burn center in the area. In 2009, St. Christopher’s achieved Magnet status, which is one of the nation's highest forms of recognition for nursing excellence, and numerous St. Chris physicians were recognized in regional publications as being “Top Docs” in their fields.

To learn more about St. Christopher’s, visit www.stchristophershospital.com . St. Christopher’s can also be found on Facebook at www.facebook.com/StChrisHospital and on Twitter at http://twitter.com/stchrishospital. 

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