Buffalo General Medical Center Receives Quality Achievement Award

Buffalo General Medical Center Receives American Heart Association’s Get With The Guidelines-Resuscitation Bronze Quality Achievement Award

August 3, 2012 – Buffalo General Medical Center has received the Get With The Guidelines®–Resuscitation Bronze Quality Achievement Award from the American Heart Association. The recognition signifies that Buffalo General has reached an aggressive goal in using guidelines-based care to improve patient outcomes from in-hospital cardiac arrest.

The Get With The Guidelines-Resuscitation program aims to help hospital teams save more lives threatened by cardiopulmonary emergencies by consistently following the most up-to-date scientific guidelines for treating patients who suffer a cardiac arrest in the hospital.

More than 18,800 in-hospital cardiac arrests occur each year, according to the American Heart Association.

Get With The Guidelines–Resuscitation helps Buffalo General Medical Center’s staff develop and implement protocols that can reduce disability and death from cardiac and respiratory emergencies. It provides an evidence-based, quality improvement program of patient safety, medical emergency team response, effective resuscitation and post-emergency care.

Specifically, Buffalo General is awarded for meeting indentified measures in caring for adult cardiac arrest patients.

Get With The Guidelines-Resuscitation builds on the work of the American Heart Association’s National Registry of CardioPulmonary Resuscitation (NRCPR), originally launched in 1999 as a database of in-hospital resuscitation events from more than 500 hospitals. The data from the registry and now the quality program gives participating hospitals feedback on their resuscitation practice and patient outcomes and has been used to develop new evidence-based guidelines for in-hospital resuscitation.

Buffalo General Medical Center joins other hospitals across the country in putting that data to work in everyday practice to save lives. As a Get With The Guidelines-Resuscitation Bronze Award recipient, over the past 90 consecutive days, the hospital has, among other achievements:

· Had more than 20 percent of cardiac arrest patients survive to hospital discharge

· Ensured that at least 85 percent of cardiac arrest patients are getting timely CPR, defibrillation or other appropriate treatment within minutes of being found in cardiac arrest.

“Buffalo General Medical Center’s commitment to Get With the Guidelines-Resuscitation puts our quality improvement interventions and strategies into the workflow of care for their patients who experience cardiac arrest,” said Lee H. Schwamm, M.D., chair of the Get With The Guidelines National Steering Committee and professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School in Boston. “Shortening the time to effective resuscitation and maximizing post-resuscitation care is critical to patient survival.”

“Buffalo General is dedicated to helping our patients have the best possible outcomes. Implementing the American Heart Association’s Get With The Guidelines–Resuscitation program will help us accomplish this by making it easier for our teams to put proven knowledge and guidelines to work on a daily basis,” said Cheryl Klass, Senior Vice President of Operations, Buffalo General Medical Center.

About Buffalo General Medical Center

Buffalo General Medical Center is a not-for-profit, acute care teaching medical center. It is located in downtown Buffalo, NY, on the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus, a growing epicenter of top clinical, research, and medical education institutions. As the proud flagship for Kaleida Health, Western New York’s largest healthcare system, Buffalo General Medical Center is a major referral center for the most complex cardiac, orthopedic, bariatric and general surgery services, just to name a few. To learn more visit  www.kaleidahealth.org.

About Get With The Guidelines

Get With The Guidelines® is the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association’s hospital-based quality improvement program that empowers healthcare teams to save lives and reduce healthcare costs by helping hospitals follow evidence-based guidelines and recommendations. For more information, visit heart.org/quality.