Care standards group gives St. Michael Medical Center preliminary accreditation denial

SILVERDALE – The Joint Commission, a national health care standards group, gave St. Michael Medical Center a preliminary denial of accreditation in early September after an in-depth site visit in August.

The only information currently available from the Joint Commission about its assessment is a general description of an area of concern at the Silverdale hospital: “Existence at time of survey of a condition, which in the Joint Commission's view, poses a threat to patients or other individuals served.”

In an interview with the Kitsap Sun, hospital president Chad Melton said no patient harm was identified in the assessment, and he said the commission found “process improvement things we could have done better.” Melton pointed to the hospital’s emergency department as an area where deficiencies were noted, referencing processes there and how patients are assessed.

“It was really just making small tweaks to things that maybe had become inconsistent in the way that we did it,” he said. “… It’s back to basic operations. During COVID, it really was doing the best thing that we could for our community with the high volume that we saw in our ED. We had to make sure that we were hardwiring some of the things that maybe had not been as tight during COVID and to get refocused on those things.”

Melton said the commission conducted a four-day visit in August that reviewed a checklist of 250 items. Before the commission left, the hospital submitted a plan identifying improvements, he said, adding that he fully expected the hospital to keep its Joint Commission accreditation.

The commission conducted a follow-up visit this week and will return for another check-in before Thanksgiving, he said.

“They cleared us of the deficiencies that they saw when they were here at the facility, and it will be a multi-step process in order to get fully accredited again, which will happen over course of the next 60 days,” he said Thursday.

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Staffing

Asked about staffing at the Silverdale hospital, which, like other health care providers, has been strained during the pandemic, Melton reported that the facility has made “good progress.”

“We have made headway in being able to get back to, I wouldn’t call it fully staffed, because we’re staffed now, just not with core staff,” he said. “We’re still using contract labor, but the utilization of contract labor has come down about 100 nurses over the course of the past five months, so we have made good progress.”

Job postings for open nursing positions at the hospital show that Virginia Mason Franciscan Health is currently offering significant financial incentives to attract staff to the facility. For example, emergency room nurses are being offered sign-on bonuses of up to $20,000, up to $25,000 in education loan forgiveness and residency completion bonuses of up to $20,000, as well as relocation assistance.

Asked about layoffs at the facility, Melton confirmed that “less than 20 non-patient-facing” positions had been cut recently.

“We’re constantly looking and evaluating about what we need to do as part of our financial recovery,” he said. “We’ve done a look across the system and even here at St. Michael Medical Center about how we’re going to invest our dollars in certain resources to make sure that we’re putting more dollars into the front-line staff. We did make adjustments in some of our back-office type staff, some of our support positions, non-patient facing, in order to reinvest those resources on front-line.”

Nathan Pilling is a reporter covering Bainbridge Island, North Kitsap and Washington State Ferries for the Kitsap Sun. He can be reached at 360-792-5242, nathan.pilling@kitsapsun.com or on Twitter at @KSNatePilling.

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This article originally appeared on Kitsap Sun: Standards group gives St. Michael preliminary accreditation denial