Archbishop's web site Denver Catholic Register Parishes Catholic Pastoral Center
August 16, 2000
Catholic health care faces challenges, opportunities
By Nancy Frazier O'Brien
WASHINGTON (CNS) - Counting hospital beds and patients served is easy enough. But it's not so easy to assess whether patients are being treated with respect or whether patients and their families are satisfied with the pain management they receive.
That's why the Catholic Health Association set out to develop tools that would help Catholic health care facilities measure how they stack up today in a wide range of difficult-to-quantify areas, so they would be able to measure their progress - or lack of it - in later years.
The first results of the CHA's "national program of performance improvement for the Catholic health ministry" - called "Living Our Promises, Acting on Faith" - were unveiled June 12 during the organization's national assembly in San Francisco.
"This is the first time such data from Catholic acute care facilities have been collected and aggregated, and the data collection has created, in effect, a `snapsnot' of the health ministry living its commitments," said Father Michael D. Place, CHA's president and chief executive officer.
"The project specifically helps demonstrate in measurable terms how the elements that constitute Catholic identity are translated into operations at a time when fewer women and men religious are involved in health care, and when there are increases in government regulations, in the turbulence of market forces, and in cultural changes within society," he added.
Developed from data submitted by more than a third of CHA-member acute care facilities, the snapshot showed that:
- Nine out of 10 patients said they were treated with respect and dignity.
- Nearly nine out of 10 were satisfied with the pastoral care services they received.
- Seven out of 10 facilities train patient care staff on end-of-life issues such as reconciliation, conflict resolution and grieving, and more than three out of four educate staff about supportive services such as palliative care and hospice.
- Nearly nine out of 10 patients and families surveyed indicated satisfaction with the pain management interventions provided them, and three out of four facilities said they had interdisciplinary teams focusing on pain management.
- Three out of four workers at the hospitals said they experienced mutual respect among co-workers, and two out of three expressed satisfaction with their involvement in decision-making.
The factors in the performance evaluation are drawn from the "Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services" approved by the U.S. bishops in 1994.
A CHA task force focused on seven "constitutive elements" of Catholic health care - to promote and defend human dignity, attend to the whole person, care for poor and vulnerable persons, promote the common good, act on behalf of justice, steward resources, and act in communion with the church.
The task force then turned to a benchmarking phase, which, according to Regina Clifton, CHA's acting vice president for sponsorship and mission services, had three purposes - "to convert descriptions of Catholic identity into measurable and accountable outcomes, to identify successful practices as hallmarks of the health ministry of the church, and to provide measures for ongoing performance improvement."
Benchmarking, widely used in health care, is a process of establishing standards by which future progress can be measured, comparing the results with others, learning how the results were achieved and applying those lessons for improvement.
Clifton said the purpose of the data collection phase of the three-year project "was neither to create a report card nor to be the study of ministry-wide performance on the behavioral measures and characteristics described." Rather, she said, "the purpose was to develop a comparative database that will inform performance improvement."
The report found a number of areas where Catholic health systems could begin to improve. It called for:
- More frequent education of employees to build appreciation of ethnic and cultural differences.
- Greater participation of facility leaders, managers, boards and employees in education on the church's social teaching regarding work and the rights of workers.
- Increased use of standardized tools to assess patients' spiritual needs.
- Explicit planning for charity care and other services for vulnerable persons in organizations' planning and budgeting processes.
- More use of alternatives to pharmaceuticals, including prayer, music, touch therapy, guided imagery or acupuncture, for the management of pain.
- Increased participation of employees, physicians and boards in education about the "Ethical and Religious Directives."
"One challenge in particular appears acute: many of these improvements call for expanded education of employees, leaders, physicians and boards," the report said. "Today's work environment in health care organizations, however, is severely limiting - or prohibiting - opportunities for educational interventions for staff and leadership groups."
The current project applies only to acute-care Catholic health facilities, although a similar project is in the works for Catholic long-term facilities.
