Samaritan group receives ‘Heroes of Healthcare’ award
From left, Director of Emergency Services Rebecca Suarez and nurses Amanda Martinez and Courtney Koehn are recognized for the “Heroes of Healthcare” award given to the hospital’s sepsis team.
CHERYL SCHWEIZER/COLUMBIA BASIN HERALD
MOSES LAKE — A team of Samaritan Healthcare doctors and nurses, physician assistants, nurse practitioners, lab technicians and other staff recently received an award for their work on a plan to help patients susceptible to sepsis.
“Sepsis is the body’s extreme reaction to an infection,” according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.
Director of Emergency Services Rebecca Suarez and emergency room nurses Courtney Koehn and Amanda Martinez represented the team that won the “Heroes of Rural Healthcare” award for 2024 at the Samaritan commission meeting Tuesday.
Sepsis is very dangerous and even life-threatening, according to the CDC, and early diagnosis is important. But it’s difficult to identify, so the emergency department staff started a program to help Samaritan employees detect it.
That started with a Sepsis Committee, which studied how different departments could work to identify possible sepsis patients more quickly. Committee members also evaluated ways hospital staff could use existing material, including a set of questions and answers from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, to help identify sepsis cases.