Valdosta, GA — South Georgia Medical Center (SGMC) has received the Get With The Guidelines®–Resuscitation Bronze Quality Achievement Award from the American Heart Association (AHA). The recognition signifies that SGMC has reached an aggressive goal in using guidelines-based care to improve patient outcomes from in-hospital cardiac arrest.More than 18,800 in-hospital cardiac arrests occur each year, according to the AHA.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.Get With The Guidelines–Resuscitation helps SGMC’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, SGMC is awarded for meeting identified measures in caring for adult cardiac arrest patients.Get With The Guidelines-Resuscitation builds on the work of the AHA’s National Registry of CardioPulmonary Resuscitation, 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.SGMC joins other hospitals across the country in putting that data to work in everyday practice to save lives, ensuring cardiac arrest patients are getting timely CPR, defibrillation or other appropriate treatment within minutes of being found in cardiac arrest.“SGMC’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.” “SGMC is dedicated to helping our patients have the best possible outcome and 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 Randy Sauls, SGMC CEO. ###About South Georgia Medical CenterSouth Georgia Medical Center (SGMC) is the region’s premier healthcare provider located in Valdosta, Georgia. The hospital serves an 11-county area in South Central Georgia and North Florida. It is governed by the Hospital Authority of Valdosta and Lowndes County, GA. The main hospital provides general medical services, specialty services including robotic-assisted surgeries, minimally invasive and general surgeries, comprehensive cancer care, open heart surgery and angioplasty, women and children’s services, imaging services, neurology and neurosurgery, ambulance and emergency services and inpatient rehabilitation. In addition to its 285-bed main campus, SGMC operates two off-site campuses—the 45-bed SMITH Northview campus in Valdosta and the 63-bed SGMC Berrien campus in Nashville as its affiliates. For more information, go to our website, www.sgmc.org.About Get With The GuidelinesGet 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.
