Fine Awards to be presented for first time at PRHI event

November 12, 2008, 5:39 pm 0 Edit

The Pittsburgh Regional Health Initiative will mark its 10th anniversary with a reception at Heinz Field in Pittsburgh Wednesday, Nov. 19. The highlight of the program will be the inaugural presentation of the Fine Awards, which honor high-performing health care teams in the Pittsburgh region.
Sponsored by The Fine Foundation and the Jewish Healthcare Foundation, the Fine Awards have been established in order to recognize the critical role that teamwork plays in the safe, effective delivery of best-practice health care to patients.
Teams qualified for recognition include surgical, medical or laboratory; specialty care, community practice or skilled nursing; quality improvement, emergency or diagnostic. Health care stakeholders from the region nominated qualified teams. A national selection committee evaluated the nominees on the basis of breakthroughs in patient care and safety from January 2006 to December 2007.
“Rather than noting individual leadership and accomplishment, the Fine Awards are singular in that they honor achievements by teams of dedicated healthcare workers,” Karen Wolk Feinstein, co-founder and president of PRHI and CEO of the Jewish Healthcare Foundation, said in a prepared statement.
The top three hospital teams were selected as gold, silver and bronze awardees and will be presented gifts of $30,000, $15,000 and $10,000 respectively.
The Fine Foundation is the creation of hotel investor Milton Fine and his wife Sheila. It was established in 2007 to support the visual arts, Jewish life, science and medicine, with a particular focus on the Pittsburgh metropolitan area.
The PRHI is among the first regional consortia of medical, business and civic leaders to address health care safety and quality improvement as a social and business imperative. Turning its own community into a demonstration lab, PRHI experiments reflect three principles: Health care is local. Federal policies alone cannot achieve needed reforms; value derives from the frontline of clinical care where patients are served; and continuous improvement in quality and safety requires the highest possible standard, namely perfection. To settle for less limits achievement.