by Nicole Sue Low Chee

How do you maintain an 89% customer satisfaction rate, and manage to pull in patients from as far away as Canada and Pennsylvania? Using two of the oldest tricks in the book. Team work, and personalized attention.

In fact, DeGraff Memorial Hospital is the smallest big hospital you’ll find in this area. Despite the hospital’s massive size and association to the region’s largest health system (Kaleida Health), DeGraff still manages to maintain it’s comfortable, community feel.

Conveniently, DeGraff is located in the middle of, well… everything. Located between Erie and Niagara counties, DeGraff is on average, a half hour away from every major town, making it the ideal choice for patients who want to be close to their families. Although, the staff at DeGraff is one big family. Most of the staff at DeGraff has a lot of tenure - ten years on average. It is the staff’s intimacy that rubs off on the patients, as they become an extended part of the DeGraff family.
You see, despite DeGraff’s size, the employees from every department interact quite a bit. A large part of what makes DeGraff’s rehab program stand out and above the rest, is the customized programs each patient is placed on, developed by a staff taken not from one department, but each department across the board.

As rehab is the patient’s final pathway to recovery, each individual is continuously evaluated by everyone from the Physical Therapists, to the Dieticians, to Social Workers in order to address every possible medical angle. The higher the number of medical needs are met, the higher the level of post-rehabilitation independence will be. And according to Kaleida Health’s Rehabilitation Chief of Service (Dr. Philip Kuruvilla), the goal of Kaleida’s unique rehab system is to “get the patients back into the community (functioning) as independently as possible.”

So although every patient receives that comforting familial service, the upside of belonging to such a large health care provider is that the patients may be moved around to different facilities within the Kaleida Health care system, including Buffalo General Hospital, Millard Fillmore, and Children’s Hospital.

Patient satisfaction is pertinent not only to interaction with the tight knit staff, but also to the integration of the staff with the patient’s family. Unlike other rehab programs, the medical staff meets with the patient’s family on a regular basis not only to answer any concerns they may have, but also to receive the family’s feedback on meeting one’s individual rehabilitation needs, whether it be financial, social or medical.

In fact, located in DeGraff’s Physical Therapy gym are a full kitchen, stairs and bathroom, where patients are asked to cook, clean and carry on other daily activities before the therapists, to ensure at-home safety. As physical therapy tends to concentrate more on the lower extremities, there is a separate gym for occupational therapy, where patients can work on upper body strength. It is here that patients can exercise their cognitive skills, work on coordination, and motor skills.

DeGraff’s unforeseen innovation keeps them on the charts. Most people are unaware that DeGraff offers whirlpool treatment, speech therapy, one of the highest rated stroke rehabilitation programs, and the best driver rehabilitation program in WNY. Most patients to the driver rehab program are sent to DeGraff by their personal doctors, VESID (a state funded program), or the Department of Motor Vehicles. Although not everyone is eligible for a program, those who are often have custom built controls that are impertinent to the driver’s disorder.

The Degraff rehab team does whatever it takes to enable the patients to return to their normal lives in a short period of time. The average length of stay in a Kaleida rehab unit is only 10 to 12 days. Due to the evaluation and careful planning from the beginning, the Kaleida rehab system avoids redundancies in care that you might experience elsewhere. 97% of Kaleida’s patients return to their home environment, and most of the DeGraff patients arrive by word of mouth from former (pleased) patients.

As I perused the halls with Dr. Kuruvilla, all of the patients seemed oddly happy to see the doctor. He was greeted by every patient and staff member alike with a big smile, and conversation. It did not feel like a hospital – it was far too comfortable for that. But when a team becomes a family, and patients are extended family members, and not patients, I suppose it’s not hard to see why Dr. Kuruvilla received Kaleida’s outstanding physician of the year award, or why customer satisfaction is now synonymous with DeGraff.