Press releases

Yale-New Haven Hospital news release
Release date: June 14, 2006
Media contact: Mark D'Antonio, (203) 688-2493

Yale-New Haven Hospital a major player in effort to save 100K lives

Yale-New Haven Hospital announced patient safety improvements from its participation in the Institute of Healthcare Improvement's (IHI) campaign to prevent 100,000 in-hospital deaths. This campaign, which included 3,000 U.S. hospitals, began 18 months ago and is set to end today, June 14, 2006.

The IHI's "100,000 Lives" campaign asked hospitals to implement six safety strategies; at Yale-New Haven Hospital, the most recent and the most dramatic of the six was the creation of a rapid response team (RRT). The other strategies, which have already been in place at YNHH for several years, include delivering reliable, evidence-based care for heart attacks, and taking steps to prevent adverse drug events, central line infections, surgical site infections and ventilator-associated pneumonia.

The rapid response team at YNHH, initiated in January 2006, provides urgent and emergent care to patients on YNHH's medical units. The RRT team - which consists of a physician, a critical care-trained registered nurse and a respiratory therapist - is essentially an "Intensive Care Unit (ICU) at the bedside." The team is deployed as soon as any floor staff notes a "trigger sign" such as a drop in blood pressure, or simply has a hunch that a patient is deteriorating.

Within less than five minutes of being called, the RRT is at the bedside working to stabilize the patient and can often prevent a trip to the ICU. Most importantly, the team is potentially saving a life.

"The creation of a rapid response team is one of the most successful recent improvements at Yale-New Haven Hospital," said Victor Morris, M.D., assistant chief of staff, who leads the rapid response team initiative. "It's a proactive approach designed to increase patient safety. Medical literature shows you can predict which patients will have a cardiac arrest or other serious or fatal outcome based on clinical markers of instability far ahead of time," Dr. Morris said. "Our goal is to recognize and deal with those markers before patients deteriorate."

According to Thomas Balcezak, M.D., associate chief of staff at YNHH, the 100,000 Lives Campaign is counting "lives saved" by examining national statistics of in-hospital mortality, and while the number of lives saved or infections prevented in Connecticut or at YNHH is impossible to predict, "there is no doubt that patients are safer when these six initiatives are adopted."

While the Rapid Response Team is Yale-New Haven's most visible and newest initiative included in the IHI campaign, YNHH has a long standing commitment to patient safety and quality. The hospital has long participated in a program with the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) aimed at reducing central line infection rates and ventilator-associated pneumonia cases, and has consistently performed better than the CDC's benchmark.

In order to prevent adverse drug events, YNHH has adopted processes to reconcile medications across patients' hospitalizations, as well as institute other safeguards within hospital pharmacy and physician ordering. YNHH has assumed a leadership role in the delivery of reliable, evidence-based care for heart attacks and consistently ranks in the 90th percentile in publicly-reported Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (www.CMS.gov) measures of care for heart attacks.

YNHH has also implemented protocols to reduce surgical site infections through use of prophylactic antibiotics, proper hair removal and control of perioperative blood glucose levels.

"Ensuring patient safety and delivering the highest quality clinical care are extremely important to us, and we are proud and delighted to participate in IHI's campaign," said Dr. Balcezak. "It's exciting to partner with IHI to improve care and, ultimately, to save lives."

Reporters: For more information on this release, contact Mark D'Antonio, (203) 688-2493

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Last revised: Jne 14, 2006 (dh)

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