The Oscar G. Johnson VA Medical Center in Iron Mountain provides services to roughly 20,000 veterans living in the Upper Peninsula and northern Wisconsin.
It is the most rural VA Medical Center out of all 170 facilities in the country.
It’s also the best.
“The motto of the medical center is focus on excellence and putting veterans first. I think winning this award really, it makes that motto something that is not just written on the wall. It’s the culture here at this facility,” said John Jamison, Public Affairs Officer for the Oscar G. Johnson VA Medical Center.
The facility was recently awarded the 2020 Best in Overall Experience Award.
This means out of all the 170 other VA centers in the U.S., it had the highest scores in both patient and employee experience.
In the two years before that, the Iron Mountain VA Medical Center got the Best Experience Award over all the other VA facilities of comparable size.
“When we see that the efforts that we put forth, the employees here put forth, the leadership here puts forth to make sure that our veterans get good quality care, when we see that recognized nationally by the VA, it’s a very proud moment,” said Jamison.
This is the first time it’s received the Best in Overall Experience Award, but not its first award recognizing its accomplishments.
This is the third nationwide patient experience award it’s gotten in the past three years.
The VA Medical also consistently ranks nationally as one of the top five VHA facilities for employee satisfaction since 2016.
Outside of the VA, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services uses a five-star quality rating system to measure the experiences Medicare beneficiaries have with their health plan and health care system.
Health plans are rated on a scale of one to five stars, with five being the highest.
The Oscar G. Johnson VA Medical Center has gotten a 5-star facility for patient experience every year since 2017.
