CHA Releases Toolkit to Help Connect Rural Hospitals with Their Communities

GREENWOOD VILLAGE, COLO. – March 11, 2021 –

Today, Colorado Hospital Association (CHA) announced the release of its Rural Hospital Patient and Family Engagement 2021 Toolkit, the result of a two-year project funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

In 2018, CHA applied for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s “Building Trust and Mutual Respect to Improve Health Care” program and received funding to evaluate the role of hospital-based patient and family engagement strategies in building trust with rural communities. As part of this two-year project, CHA, in coordination with the University of Colorado Center for Bioethics and Humanities, administered the Communication Climate Assessment Tool (C-CAT) to six rural hospitals. The purpose of C-CAT is to obtain a set of clear, valid measurements that can be used to tailor and focus hospitals’ quality improvement efforts specific to patient-centered outcomes focused on building trust.

“Across Colorado, rural and critical access hospitals are the lifeblood of their communities,” said Darlene Tad-y, MD, CHA vice president of clinical affairs. “As such, it’s critical for those hospitals to engage with patients and their families to ensure that the communities’ needs are being met fully – this toolkit provides some foundational tactics that hospitals can employ to do just that.”

CHA took the learnings from the six in-depth surveys it conducted with rural member hospitals and distilled them into this new toolkit, which can be implemented in any hospital statewide. The toolkit specifically focuses on four of the nine C-CAT domains and provides actionable steps that rural hospitals take use to improve engagement with their communities in each of the following areas: leadership commitment, data collection, language services, and evaluating performance.

About Colorado Hospital Association

Colorado Hospital Association (CHA) is the leading voice of Colorado’s hospital and health system community. Representing more than 100 member hospitals and health systems throughout the state, CHA serves as a trusted, credible, and reliable resource on health issues, hospital data and trends for its members, media, policymakers, and the general public. Through CHA, Colorado’s hospitals and health systems work together in their shared commitment to improve health and health care in Colorado. Learn more at www.cha.com.

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