Narrative for Cooley Dickinson Health Care

Nursing plays a critical role in achieving the mission of Cooley Dickinson Hospital: to provide our patients and communities with the best health care in the most appropriate setting. The hospital offers local access to advanced clinical treatments in a caring and neighborly setting. The philosophy of Cooley Dickinson Hospital is to take steps to provide the appropriate skill level and mix of staff needed to meet the nursing care needs of our patients. We provide each nursing care unit with a specific staffing grid designed for the acuity level of care provided in that setting and for the volume of patients in the area.
Our staffing levels are carefully created and based on historic utilization data at Cooley Dickinson as well as external sources, such as national and regional hours per patient day and benchmarks for overall and nursing-sensitive quality indicators. Nursing teams collaborate and share resources to provide safe and effective care. At Cooley Dickinson, collaboration is at the core of our nursing practice. We strive to achieve high value through superior results in quality and safety, patient experience and the efficiency of care we deliver. We understand that providing quality care that is grounded in evidence-based practice takes continuous improvement. This is our passion.
Approximately 300 nurses, 1,600 professional and support staff and nearly 400 affiliated physicians partner to create a network of emergency, surgical, medical, rehabilitative, palliative, hospice, and home care experts. We treat over 40,000 emergency patients per year. We welcome over 800 new babies into the world annually. We offer three levels of intensive care. We provide evidence-based medical, surgical, stroke, and cardiac care. We collaborate with Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center to deliver comprehensive cancer care. We have diagnostic cardiac catheterization and interventional radiology teams. We provide all of these services using a Patient and Family Centered Care Model of which nursing is at the core.
Cooley Dickinson has been ranked in the top 5 percent of all U.S. hospitals in patient safety by HealthGrades®, the country's leading independent health care ratings organization, for three consecutive years. HealthGrades® has also recently named Cooley Dickinson #1 in Massachusetts for joint replacement outcomes.