JOINT BASE CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA –
Naval Health Clinic Charleston takes great pride in delivering the safest and highest quality healthcare to service members, retirees, family members and veterans. Since the beginning of the new year, NHCC has already made great strides in providing more and better services than ever before in our history.
Our hard working and dedicated staff is committed to delivering the gold standard of health care to our beneficiaries. We guarantee that by implementing strategic goals in direct alignment with the goals set forth by the Navy’s Surgeon General, Vice Admiral Faison, and the Navy Bureau of Medicine: Readiness, Health and Partnership.
The driving vision of Navy Medicine’s strategic goal of “Readiness” is to prepare our personnel to “save lives wherever our forces operate – at and from the sea.” There are three primary objectives under the Readiness Goal. The first is to focus on the training and medical readiness of our active duty beneficiaries. The second is to build and maintain the trauma-support skills and competence of our staff members. And the third is to support the on-going engagement of internal and external subject matter experts within the medical field to provide a robust, relevant clinical experience for our staff.
To meet these objectives, we’re working with the commands we support to ensure their service members are medically prepared to carry out their missions and to deploy at any time. We’re also increasing skills enhancement and sustainment training to ensure our personnel are learning the most up-to-date, state-of-the-art skills in medicine.
Navy Medicine’s Health Goal is to “provide the best care our nation can offer to Sailors, Marines and their families to keep them healthy, ready and on the job.” NHCC has implemented strategies to meet the objectives within this goal: first, to enhance access to care and to provide each patient a “family” experience; secondly, to improve management of the health care of our wounded warriors on limited duty.
To ensure we reach these objectives, NHCC is providing extensive customer service training to our personnel. We’re communicating more with our patients and increasing information exchange through modern electronic technology. Lastly, we’re optimizing secure messaging, an easy way for patients to email their healthcare providers directly. Our goal is to enhance the patient’s experience by providing excellent customer service, doing everything we can to keep them safe and making it easy for them to make an appointment or talk to their doctors using today’s technology.
Navy Medicine’s third goal, Partnership, stresses strengthening relationships with outside organizations. This goal is extremely relevant to NHCC because we are a tenant command on a joint service installation, sharing a building with the Department of Veterans Affairs. As a leading member of the Lowcountry Federal Health Alliance, we collaborate on a regular basis with staff of the 628th Medical Group, Ralph Johnson Veterans Affairs Medical Center and Naval Hospital Beaufort. We have become the model for similar joint ventures between the Department of Defense and Veterans Affairs.
Other initiatives we are using to build upon our partnerships include collaborating with three local urgent care centers to increase communication and coordination of care and teaming up with Joint Base Charleston, community and other federal agencies for emergency management/joint disaster preparation and training. We are also coordinating with TRICARE network facilities to enable our medical professionals to participate in Continuing Education (CE) and Continuing Medical Education (CME) programs.
Our staff members’ expertise is what has made us the gold standard in our community. NHCC staff members know that no matter what their job is, their contributions directly affect the experience and safety of those we serve. Our enrollment is up to nearly 17,000 patients annually, with more than 540 ambulatory-care visits, 72 dental visits, 1,000 pharmacy prescriptions dispensed and 1,300 lab procedures performed, daily.
Our staff’s expertise and dedication has helped us earn consistent recognition from the National Committee for Quality Assurance; the Gold Star Award from the Navy Surgeon General's Health Promotion and Wellness Award Program; laboratory accreditation from the College of American Pathologists and the gold seal of approval from the Joint Commission.
We know that Readiness, Health, and Partnership begin with us. As we move forward, we do so with the desire to improve the experience for our staff as well as our beneficiaries, while enhancing our ability to provide world class care, anytime, anywhere.