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WORLAND – Worland Healthcare and Rehabilitation has just recently learned that they have earned the silver award from the American Health Association National Center for Assisted Living and a five-star facility rating from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).

“All of this makes me proud to be providing great care to those that need our services. It makes me proud of myself, it makes me proud of my team. Each of my managers are amazing at their jobs and they truly put the residents, the families and the employees first. I really believe that it takes a great team to achieve these results and Worland Health care has that team. Achieving the silver shows that,” Worland Health care and Rehabilitation Center director Heidi Glanz said.

The silver award from the American Health Association is a national quality award and comes in three forms; bronze, silver and gold. Worland Health care and Rehabilitation Center earned the bronze award in 2015. “Is a progressive three-step process that sets high standards for quality and encourages centers to commit to excelling in performance. Each progressive step requires a more detailed and comprehensive demonstration of systematic quality improvement. The criteria is based on the Health care criteria from the Baldrige Performance Excellence program which is based on seven steps of criteria,” Glanz said.

The seven steps of criteria are:

— Leadership.

— Strategy.

— Customers.

— Measurement, analysis and knowledge management.

— Workforce.

— Operations.

— Results.

“In our application we had to address each of those seven criteria and explain how, basically how our systems work here for quality improvement and quality performance,” Glanz explained. Once you win the bronze then you can apply for the silver. They applied for the silver in November of last year.

“It was about 150 hours that I spent on this application. Worland Health Care as a team, we successfully were able to demonstrate an assessment of our systematic approaches, performance measures and sustainable organizational and process results that were linked to the key customer requirements, success factors and strategic objectives,” she added.

Glanz stated that she intends to apply for the gold and that she needs to have the application in by Nov. 8. “The gold is at the top, so you are recognized as some of the best performers in the long-term care profession. Winning the gold would demonstrate our deployment of systematic approaches and consistency of results that prove we are achieving high levels of performance in health care, customer satisfaction, market, work force, process and leadership outcomes,” Glanz said. “You turn in the application and American Health Care Association has a whole board of examiners that go through and review every application and then they pick, in their opinion as a board of examiners, who met all of those expectations. You had to have the data and lots of graphs, proving that your systems really are working,” she added.

On top of winning the silver award, the facility has been rated as a five-star facility by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services for the very first time. “The bulk of our systems are regulated by CMS so the largest piece of this rating is called quality measures. These are tools that help measure and quantify health care processes, outcomes, patient perceptions and organizational structure and/ or systems that are associated with the ability to provide high quality health and/or that relate to quality goals for Health care. Those goals are effective, safe, efficient, patient centered, equitable and timely. A few examples, there are 20 quality measures that CMS, that we have to turn in to CMS or that they follow us on every month. A few of those are pain, pressure ulcers, falls, anti-psychotic meds [medications], weight loss and increase in ADL (activities of daily living) help. We reached the five star rating on all of our quality measures and then the other three tools that make up the overall rating are: overall staffing (five star) , RN [registered nurse] staffing (five star) and state health inspection (four star) so all together we are five star,” Glanz said. She added that when she started the facility was rated at two stars for quality measures. The facility always had pretty good health inspection surveys and a pretty good staffing rating but the quality measures, which is all the clinical side of things, held the facility back.

“Having the silver and then this is the first time that this building has ever been a five star rated building, that’s pretty awesome,” Glanz stated.

Glanz feels that with the information and data from CMS along with the information from the facilities application for the silver award, the facility has a good chance of achieving the gold. The gold application is much like the silver application but much more in-depth.