About UC Davis Medical Center

UC Davis Medical Center serves a 65,000-square-mile area that includes 33 counties and 6 million residents across Northern and Central Calfornia. The acute-care teaching hospital is licensed for 613 beds and maintains an annual budget of roughly $1 billion.  

With more than 6,500 employees, UC Davis provides vital care to more than 200,000 patients every year, admitting 25,000 patients for extended care and handling more than 900,000 visits.  The medical center's emergency room sees an average of 150 patients every day.

A message from the CEO: Our culture of patient safety

Dear Patients, Visitors, Friends and Colleagues,

Ann Madden Rice, CEO
UC Davis Medical Center
Biographical Profile 

Providing quality patient care in the safest manner is the top priority for everyone at UC Davis Medical Center, from our physicians and nurses to professional staff far from the hospital floor.

We strive to demonstrate our culture of patient safety in many ways every day – ranging from our standing safety committees, to our voluntary participation in public reporting initiatives, to our aggressive policy to protect patients from the flu, to our “Speak Up” campaign to educate patients about how to stay involved in their own care.

I am happy to share a telling fact about these efforts. The Leapfrog Group is a national consortium that provides a broad assessment of hospital quality and safety. Some of the nation’s largest employers – such as FedEx, Boeing and Intel – spearhead this public-reporting initiative to drive improvements or “leaps” in the quality of care for their employees. 

The Leapfrog Safe Practices survey rates hospitals’ progress on indicators designated by the National Quality Forum, a not-for-profit organization of physicians, consumer groups, medical trades, accrediting bodies and hospitals, including UC Davis Medical Center.

Out of 707 possible points hospitals could receive on a variety of safety measures in Leapfrog’s 2008 report, UC Davis Medical Center received 706.19 points; we ranked 13th among 1,153 participating hospitals across the entire country.

We also received top scores in quality for several high-risk surgical procedures that Leapfrog surveys, including bariatric surgery, high-risk deliveries, and pancreatic and esophageal resectioning (used to treat conditions such as early-stage cancer and trauma). Several of our other procedures showed good outcomes as well.

Our Leapfrog score reflects hard work and dedication to patient-centered care by thousands of physicians, nurses, technicians and support staff. The priority we place on patient safety is longstanding, and it has even been influential outside our own institution. For example, we developed a Web-based system that allows frontline medical workers to quickly report trends and patterns in medical incidents. The entire UC system eventually adopted this method.

We also learned that Sacramento-area consumers again chose UC Davis Medical Center as the hospital with the Sacramento region’s best overall quality and reputation. This is the 11th year in a row we have received this distinction, known as the Consumer Choice Award, from the National Research Corporation.  

Thank you – we value the confidence and trust you have placed in us!

May good health be yours,

Ann Madden Rice
Chief Executive Officer
UC Davis Medical Center