Providence St. Patrick Hospital has been chosen for the third year in a row as the best hospital in Montana by U.S. News and World Report.

Chief Executive for Providence St. Patrick Hospital Joyce Dombrouski spoke to KGVO on Wednesday about the honor.

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“We are always extremely gratified when we get external awards,” said Dombrouski. “I don't know if it's an award or an acknowledgement, but it does reflect the outstanding work that our medical staff, our APP’s, all of our caregivers give really every single day at St. Pat’s, we're humbled at the same time. We earned this in the midst of a pandemic. And again, it's a testimony to the people who come to work every single day with a focus of taking good care of you and the people of this community.”

Dombrouski said U.S. News and World Report has its own criteria when choosing each state’s best hospital.

“It is from US News and World Report,” she said. “They have been giving these awards out for several years. They go down through a list of types of patients that we care for, and they're also looking at our patient satisfaction scores. They're looking at our publicly reported quality scores that are already out there. So it's a compilation of clinical quality, predominantly numbers of patients that we care for. So they want to make sure they're judging hospitals sort of fairly against each other. When that all added up, we were the number one hospital in the state of Montana based on that data.”

Dombrouski said she was justifiably proud of every department in the hospital.

“From our food service and our environmental services folks who really make sure that what you might think of as the basic necessities which are critical, obviously,” she said. “Our registered nurses or respiratory therapists or pharmacists, all of our bedside clinical providers and then really our medical staff those who voluntarily want to be on our medical staff and then direct and care for their patients in an environment of support for each other.”

Dombrouski said she and her leadership teams are intentional in making the hospital as safe as it can be for patients and staff.

“We have some very specific daily meetings, conversations and ways of being in the world that are culturally ingrained in what we do every day,” she said. “I think that that safety and culture are so strong,  and on top of  that, really important is the compassion. We're taking care of people. We're humans taking care of humans, and our patients feel that level of compassion and they tell us so. They tell us they felt cared for.”

St. Patrick Hospital is a regional tertiary care center with 253 beds, operating the area’s only Level II Trauma Center and centers of excellence for cardiac and stroke programs.

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