St Nicholas Hospital

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Four members of the Hospital Sisters of St. Francis arrived in Sheboygan in the spring of 1890, and the first hospital began a short time later. These four Sisters founded St. Nicholas Hospital in a two-story building built for them by the community. St. Nicholas Hospital has taken the lead in meeting the healthcare needs of this area ever since.

The Hospital has always been committed to investing in its facilities and equipment to provide the highest quality services with modern technology at a reasonable cost. Services first brought to this area by St. Nicholas Hospital and its physician partners include:

•	Board certified emergency medicine physician specialists who staff the Hospital's Emergency Department 24/7
•	A 16-slice CT scanner opened up new areas of diagnostic imaging, including cutting-edge tests such as noninvasive cardiac imaging
•	The area's first PET/CT equipment, unique diagnostic technology combining Positron Emission Tomography (PET) and Computed Tomography (CT) technologies into one and used to determine the location and extent of tumor growth. The addition of this technology eliminates the need for patients to travel to Milwaukee
•	A recently established Institutional Review Board that brings to the community the opportunity to partner with physicians and participate in clinical drug studies to improve future outcomes for cancer and cardiac patients
•	The introduction of minimally invasive hip replacement surgery, which utilizes a smaller incision and improves patient recovery time
•	The Sheboygan Comprehensive Spine Care Center (CSCC) facility with the only full-time spine specialists in the area, which includes orthopaedic surgeons, a neurologist, physicians who specialize in pain management, psychologists, and a variety of rehabilitation specialists working in partnership with a patient's primary care physician.
•	The area's first fixed-base magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), a powerful tool for diagnosing cancer as well as vascular, disc, and bone diseases
•	Use of the intra-aortic balloon pump for the treatment of heart disease
•	The first permanent installation in a three-county area of a holmium laser for the treatment of kidney stones
•	Timely administration of "clot busting" medication to patients in the Emergency Department, which reduces damage caused by heart attacks and strokes
•	A Chest Pain Evaluation Center to better evaluate and treat patients with all types of chest pain
•	Participation in national and international cardiac, pulmonary, and diabetes clinical trials providing the most current treatment options to our patients
•	A Hospital-based radiation therapy program, improving outcomes for patients with cancer
•	A renal dialysis unit, which saves patients from having to travel to Milwaukee several times a week for these life-saving treatments
•	The Center for Pain and Work Rehabilitation, providing relief for people with chronic pain and workplace wellness programs
•	A Hospital-based angiography laboratory, providing cardiologists and radiologists with advanced diagnostic tools for the most timely and accurate detection of heart and vascular disease

In addition to taking the lead in meeting the area’s healthcare needs, St. Nicholas Hospital is equally committed to assuring that all its programs and services are of the highest quality. St. Nicholas Hospital believes that quality in healthcare is doing the right thing at the right time and doing it well. The Hospital incorporates a wide variety of performance improvement methodologies throughout its operations, constantly evaluating the efficacy of its work.

External benchmarking efforts include participation in a number of comparative databases, including the Quality Indicator Project®. With more than 1,700 participants, the Project is the largest comparative analysis database of its type in the United States. Project indicators measure facility-level clinical outcomes and focus on areas of care that are universally important to healthcare organizations (e.g., mortality rates, unscheduled readmissions, use of restraints, infection rates). The Project contains data from more than 20 percent of all U.S. hospitals.

The Hospital also joined the American Heart Association in its "Get with the Guidelines" program for continuous quality improvement for prevention of cardiovascular events and stroke.

Additional external benchmarks include data compilation and comparison from the Functional Improvement Measurement System, the Center for Healthcare Industry Performance Studies, the Wisconsin Hospital Association's CheckPoint Quality initiative, and the CMS Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services Hospital Quality Alliance.

The Hospital also utilizes internal benchmarks in its ongoing efforts to monitor and improve its quality. Patient satisfaction studies are regularly conducted projects for all inpatient admissions as well as for outpatient services, the Emergency Department, Ambulatory Surgery, Renal Dialysis, Comprehensive Rehabilitation Inpatient Unit, and Occupational Health. The Hospital also conducts Consumer Surveys, Patient Waiting Time Studies, Physician Credentialing, and Physician Peer Review Analysis. The Hospital's Performance Improvement and Quality Care Committees and the Board of Directors receive reports from these data and trends benchmarking efforts for review and action when appropriate.

St. Nicholas Hospital continues to take the lead in meeting the healthcare needs of this area with excellent partnerships, facilities, equipment, and services. At the same time, the Hospital has never lost the direction set forth by the founding Sisters more than a century ago: The purpose of St. Nicholas Hospital is as deep and as broad as is human life; therefore, it is scientific, it is ethical, and it is religious. St. Nicholas Hospital continues under the sole sponsorship of the Hospital Sisters of St. Francis as one of 13 hospitals in Illinois and Wisconsin affiliated with Hospital Sisters Health System. Its mission of healing and philosophy of caring continues to revolve around treating the whole individual-spiritually and emotionally as well as physically.

St. Nicholas Hospital is a Catholic nonprofit, acute care community hospital with 185 licensed beds; it employs more than 500 professional, technical, and ancillary people and has a medical staff of more than 100 physicians and allied health professionals. Its accreditations include:

• Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations
• College of American Pathologists
• National Committee for Clinical Laboratory Standards
• Commission on Accreditation of Rehabilitation Facilities
• American College of Surgeons/Commission on Cancer
• • American Association of Cardiovascular and Pulmonary Rehabilitation
National Mammography Quality Assurance Advisory Committee

You can reach any of its services by calling 920-459-8300.

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