HJNO Mar/Apr 2024

DIALOGUE can to achieve that goal. We had five-star, dropped back to four-star, and worked very hard to come back and regain that position as a five-star health system. Editor Don't you think every CEO of a hospital is trying to accomplish that? What do you think makes you guys able to do it? Coffman You're going to hear me say this 10 times over. It has all to do with the culture and the team that you have in place. I'll be very honest, and I'm dating myself, but in the early '80s when I worked here as an X-ray tech, while it was a much smaller organization, the culture was as apparent then as it is today. When you think about a community that strives for excellence in whatever they are doing, that is this community. We provide, through various channels, a pathway for our colleagues to continue to upskill and develop their talent to the degree that they can and want to. It's important to us to focus on the workforce, and our board of commissioners is very supportive in allowing us to continue to grow and develop our workforce and invest in them so that they want to do the very best for their patients and community. People hear me say all the time that the workforce is our greatest asset, and that's truly the reality of what's happening here. They come to work every day with a desire to make a difference, and they do so in a very collaborative spirit. families with excellence, compassion, and teamwork. That was what we reconstituted or reimagined as our mission statement back in 2019. Editor What does it mean today to be a community hospital? Coffman For us, it's a responsibility to meet the needs of the residents that we serve, placing the patient first always, whether it means in our care delivery on the inpatient, outpatient, or ambulatory side. You have to check all those boxes. It also means meeting the needs of the community where they are — programs like Healthier Northshore that we started back in 2020 in the height of the pandemic to really meet them where they are. The primary focus of Healthier North- shore, which encompasses both St. Tam- many and Washington Parish, is really threefold — education is No. 1 because we feel like the best thing we can do with our resources is make sure that [patients] have information to make an informed decision; certainly, early detection and screening so they can hopefully live healthier lives; and then connecting to resources. St. Tammany Health System and our broader community offer a lot of resources, and it was important for us to be able to comprise all of those on a website in a single location or depository for them to be able to find the resources they may need. To truly answer your question, St. Tammany Health System, back in 1954, was really founded by our community leaders. There was someone in the community that needed healthcare services that were not available on the Northshore. They were in an ambulance. This is pre-causeway days, so they had to go around the long way and, unfortunately, had an accident and landed in the swamps of Manchac. With that delay in care, the patient expired. The community leaders then rallied together and said, “We need a hospital here so our patients and our community can be treated for their health- care needs right here close to home.”And we still, to this day, use that tagline, “world-class healthcare close to home.” Editor Speaking of world-class healthcare, St. Tammany's one of only two hospitals in Louisiana with a five-star ranking from CMS. First, congratulations; and second, why is that? Coffman We work hard at it. There are certain measures that are important for us to hit. When I think about us being embedded in the very fabric of the community, they don't want mediocre care; they want world-class healthcare. So, quite honestly, our team has such a focus on clinical excellence that anytime we have an opportunity — we call it our journey to high reliability, and it's a perpetual journey — to look at something that we've been classified in, if we're not at the highest level of performance and it's meaningful, we want to do everything we MISSION VISION VALUES MISSION We are the heartbeat of our community, caring for patients and families with excellence, compassion and teamwork. VISION We will strengthen the health of our community with compassion, innovation and partnership. VALUES Teamwork | Trust | Compassion | Quality | Innovation ST. TAMMANY HEALTH SYSTEM'S GUIDING PRINCIPLES