Welcome to Patient and Guest Relations

Thank you for entrusting your care to us. People check into a hospital at a time when their needs are powerful. You want expertise to heal or palliate your sickness or injury, and also great compassion to help you feel calm and confident during your healing. At Cayuga Medical Center, we strive to deliver both expertise and compassion with dedication, excellence, and responsiveness.

We hope you will let our Patient and Guest Relations office help in any way we can so you may have a very positive experience at Cayuga Medical Center. We pledge to do our best work to live up to your trust.

Our role

Being in the hospital, or having a loved one in the hospital, can be a very vulnerable experience. You may have needs that you don’t know exactly how to address.

In Patient and Guest Relations, we provide a friendly face and an advocate; someone you can talk to who can either resolve your need directly or can guide you to the people who can help. We want your experience with Cayuga Medical Center to be one of comfort and a sense that your needs are being attended to and addressed.

Here’s how you may contact us for help:

In addition to the highest-quality health care we believe you deserve:

          Honesty

          Integrity

          Dignity

          Respect

          Compassion

          Confidentiality in all appropriate matters

These are some of the things we can do to help you have a good hospital experience:

Before your stay:

provide information on area accommodations (see links below for online information)

During your stay:

facilitate communication and act as a liaison between you and the hospital staff

refer you to appropriate departments for specific needs

help you understand CMC’s policies and procedures

explore and resolve concerns

help to assure that the New York State Patients Bill of Rights is fully honored

through Caring Bridge help you set up a free personal web page to help family and friends stay informed of a patient’s progress

After your stay:

follow up on any questions, compliments, or concerns that may have arisen during the time you were a patient or guest at CMC

We can direct you to the appropriate department for these services:

special needs services such as services for the hearing, visual, or physically impaired

interpreters for languages other than English

advance directives and living wills (Social Work Department)

notary public in hospital

Chaplain

Lost and found, which is housed in our Security office. You may call them at 607-274-4422. (We will make every effort to locate a patient’s lost property, however, we are not responsible for lost or stolen property.)

Online links you might find helpful:

          Billing/sample statement:  Paying for Your Care

          Area accommodations:  http://visitithaca.com/lodging/search.cfm

          Area restaurants:  http://visitithaca.com/dining/dining.cfm

Getting to the hospital: for maps and public transit information, see http://www.visitithaca.com/gettinghere/gettinghere.cfm

          (A note about parking at any of our facilities: there is plenty of it and it’s free!)

          Local attractions:  http://visitithaca.com/attractions/attractions.cfm

We’d love to hear your thoughts.

If we have succeeded in our goal to provide exceptional medical care, we would love to hear about it. We are always happy to share positive feedback from patients and families with our caregivers.

If in some way we have fallen short of that aim, we want to hear about that, too, so we can work to remedy any obstacles to our delivering the highest quality medical service to you.

We make every effort to resolve concerns immediately, and this is often possible. If not, we:

explore the issue in a timely manner, engaging all appropriate staff members in the exploration 

          resolve the issue raised

follow up with you to let you know the resolution of the issue, unless you have indicated to us that you are not interested in hearing back from us. (Note: if you do wish to hear from us, please let us know how you would prefer to be reached: phone, e-mail, etc.)

If you are a patient with us, when your stay is finished, you will receive a survey in the mail from Press Ganey, a company that evaluates patient satisfaction in our medical center. We are very grateful if you fill it out, as it helps guide us in our delivery of top-quality health care. We also welcome online feedback.

Click here to tell us about your experience.

Thank you for choosing Cayuga Medical Center.