News and Events
09.09.07
Goodall Hospital Recieves $282,000 Grant
Sanford - Goodall Hospital is pleased to announce that it has recently been named a recipient of a $283,000 patient safety research grant from the Donaghue Foundation. This is the first time the Donaghue Foundation has awarded a grant in the state of Maine.
In applying for this competitive grant, Goodall Hospital partnered with the USM Muskie School’s Institute for Health Policy. Members of the Muskie School staff will work with staff members at Goodall Hospital to implement and manage the grant, which will encompass a two-year period of time.
“We are very excited to receive the Donaghue Foundation grant,” said Darlene Stromstad, FACHE, President/CEO of Goodall Hospital. “It helps illustrate Goodall Hospital’s ability to not only impact healthcare for the local population, but also to impact how healthcare is delivered by other hospitals in Maine.”
The grant, entitled “Improving Patient Safety through Leadership and Teamwork”, will utilize Crew Resource Management (CRM) training in Goodall Hospital’s Emergency Department to enhance teamwork and patient safety. Because the hospital’s Emergency Department interacts with virtually all other departments in the hospital, this training will expand hospital-wide on a department-by-department basis.
The USM Muskie School will evaluate this project to identify how teamwork training affects patient care and outcomes. According to Dr. Andrew Coburn, Director of the Institute for Health Policy and principal investigator for the grant, “This is an important opportunity to study how we can improve patient safety in smaller hospitals which have traditionally not benefited from large-scale patient safety initiatives and grant programs.”
Goodall Hospital’s senior leadership is especially involved in the CRM training and in the goal of improving patient safety at the facility. A board-driven patient care committee keeps the hospital keenly focused on patient safety and quality, and will be a prominent part of the grant training process. Other key features of the grant include the development of a train-the-trainer system to ensure sustainability of the teachings, development of human resource and other organizational strategies to support teamwork, and broad dissemination of the experience and results of the project.
“Goodall Hospital is uniquely suited to a grant of this scope,” said Mary Finnegan, the hospital’s Director of Performance Improvement and one of the grant’s project directors. “In the past couple of years patient satisfaction has greatly improved at Goodall – much of that driven by the hospital’s new leadership. This positive trend, and our hospital’s size and structure, allows us to maximize this grant’s potential and create significant changes in how healthcare is delivered.”
As part of the conditions of the grant, Goodall Hospital is required to publish the results of its grant-funded training, present those results at one national conference, and assist other hospitals in implementing CRM training at their facilities.
“The ability to take what we learn from this training and share it with other healthcare organizations in Maine and beyond is very exciting,” said Ms. Finnegan. “This enables us to reinvest the dividends from the Donaghue Foundation’s support.”
Only four hospitals in New England were included in this particular grant from the Donaghue Foundation. In addition to Goodall Hospital, other grant recipients are Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Danbury Hospital in Danbury, Connecticut, and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. In total, the Donaghue Foundation has awarded $1,173,000 in grant funding to the four medical institutions.
“Being a part of such a well-respected group of hospitals is very rewarding to all of us at Goodall Hospital. It reinforces our belief in our quality, our mission, and our ability to impact positive change in healthcare,” said Ms. Stromstad.
Goodall Hospital is a 53-bed community hospital located in Sanford, Maine. Each year the hospital experiences nearly 25,000 patients in its Emergency Department. The Emergency Department recently underwent a $2 million expansion to double its size and improve its technology to handle this volume.
The Patrick & Catherine Weldon Donaghue Medical Research Foundation was established by Ethel Donaghue in memory of her parents. The Foundation is a charitable testamentary trust dedicated to furthering the search for medical knowledge of practical benefit to human life. The Foundation focuses on initiatives to strengthen research on health issues, to promote future research leadership, and to put new knowledge to work for public benefit.
