Happy National Emergency Nurses Day! Today, we honor the incredible emergency nurses who are always ready to provide life-saving care in the most critical moments. Your expertise, compassion, and dedication make a world of difference for patients and their families.
Read on to learn more about how a chance meeting on “Y Mountain” in Provo, Utah led to a life-saving kidney transplant for a local pastor whose health was deteriorating and was desperately waiting for an organ donor.
Happy National Healthcare Supply Chain Week! This week, we shine a spotlight on the amazing professionals who ensure our healthcare facilities are always prepared. From managing medical supplies to coordinating essential equipment, your behind-the-scenes efforts are crucial for delivering top-notch patient care.
Intermountain Health’s involvement with community program Latinos in Action is teaching skills—and possibly saving lives. Intermountain and Latinos in Action have partnered up to provide students with the opportunity to get trained as Health Screeners. This micro-credential provides a means to develop skills and a knowledge base for addressing social determinants of health, pre-diabetes, and high blood pressure. The course gives students content expertise and necessary skills to successfully perform health screenings, interpret the collected data, and become a health advocate. High school junior Zabrina Garcia took the course (twice!) through Latinos in Action. For an assignment, she screened her grandpa and discovered he had prediabetes. For people like Zabrina’s grandpa, the program offers several potential next steps. It prepared Zabrina to talk to her grandpa about what diabetes could mean for him and refer him to Intermountain resources, including free disease management classes. Zabrina graduated last year—and her grandpa was there to see it. She credits her Latino in Action class with helping her figure out she wants to major in early childhood development this fall at Utah Valley University.
Happy National Healthcare Food Service Week! This week, we celebrate the incredible dedication and hard work of our healthcare food service professionals. You play a vital role in ensuring that our patients receive nutritious and delicious meals, contributing to their overall well-being and recovery.
When that call for help comes, Intermountain Life Flight emergency responders must be ready. Spend the day with our Life Flight team and see firsthand what a "flying ICU" is like in the KSL 5 TV story below.
Dedicating his life to the service of others, Dr. Rob Ferguson, Intermountain Health Peaks Region chief medical officer, and his wife, Andrea, founded Amanaki Fo'ou in 2014. Amanaki Fo'ou (Tongan for “A New Hope”) is an organization dedicated to eliminating diabetes among indigenous populations. Learn more about how Dr. Ferguson's family's crusade against diabetes is empowering communities through education and service in the article below.
Vanessa Kibble is the nutrition services manager at Park City Hospital in Park City, Utah, and has been there for four years. She oversees a team of caregivers who directly interact with patients; ensures all room service (patient meals) are properly handled; and manages the cafes, bistros, and catering as well. Vanessa also rounds throughout the week and prioritizes connecting with patients who may have a tough time ordering meals or are on restricted (therapeutic) diets. She often walks them through meeting both the therapeutic diet orders and finding a meal to satisfy them. Vanessa is also a highly skilled chef with an incredible resume. But according to her family, becoming a chef was not an option. In fact, when Vanessa decided to become a chef, she snuck off to Europe to go to culinary school. After finishing school, she worked her way into Gordon Ramsay’s restaurant in London's prestigious Claridge’s Hotel. She eventually made her way to Utah and owned her own restaurant before landing at Intermountain Health. We caught up with her to discuss her transition from restaurants to healthcare, her approach to working with patients, how she handles meeting medical needs and patient food requests, and her decision to become a chef.
When it became clear that a patient at Layton Hospital in Layton, Utah wasn't able to care for his beloved black Lab, Ashley Bailey, emergency department RN coordinator, stepped forward with a solution — she adopted the dog and took her home that day.
Congratulations to the following 8 Intermountain Health hospitals for being recognized by Vizient with the Bernard A. Birnbaum, MD, Quality Leadership Award for 2024! Top perfomers in the comprehensive academic medical center cohort: ✔️ Intermountain Medical Center - Murray, Utah Top performers in the large, specialized complex care medical center cohort: ✔️ McKay-Dee Hospital - Ogden, Utah ✔️ St. George Regional Hospital - St. George, Utah ✔️ Utah Valley Hospital - Provo, Utah Top performers in the community hospital cohort: ✔️ Alta View Hospital - Sandy, Utah ✔️ Cedar City Hospital - Cedar City, Utah ✔️ Layton Hospital - Layton, Utah ✔️ Riverton Hospital - Riverton, Utah The Bernard A. Birnbaum, MD, Quality Leadership Award recognizes participating healthcare organizations in four cohorts through the Vizient Quality and Accountability Study, which measures performance on the quality of patient care in six domains: safety, mortality, effectiveness, efficiency, patient centeredness and equity. The study factors in measures from the Vizient Clinical Data Base and includes performance data from the HCAHPS survey and the CDC's National Healthcare Safety Network.
