UTMB is the first hospital in Texas* to receive the Get With The Guidelines — Resuscitation Gold Quality Achievement Award from the American Heart Association. The award signifies that UTMB has reached an aggressive goal in using guidelines-based care to improve outcomes for patients who suffer cardiac arrests in the hospital.

Last year, UTMB was the first hospital in Texas to receive the program’s silver award.

The Get With The Guidelines — Resuscitation program was developed with the goal to save lives of those who experience cardiac arrests through consistently following the most up-to-date research-based guidelines for treatment. Guidelines include following protocols for patient safety, medical emergency team response, effective and timely cardiopulmonary resuscitation and post-emergency care.

More than 200,000 adults and children have an in-hospital cardiac arrest each year, according to the American Heart Association.

Specifically UTMB was awarded for meeting specific measures in treating adult and pediatric cardiac arrest patients. To qualify for the awards, hospitals must demonstrate compliance with these performance measures at a set level for a designated period.

“UTMB is dedicated to helping our patients have the best possible outcome and implementing the American Heart Association’s Get With The Guidelines — Resuscitation program helps us accomplish this by making it easier for our teams to put proven knowledge and guidelines to work on a daily basis,” said Donna Sollenberger, UTMB’s executive vice president and chief executive officer.

“We are pleased to recognize UTMB for its commitment to following these guidelines,” said Dr. Deepak L. Bhatt, national chairman of the Get With The Guidelines steering committee and executive director of interventional cardiology programs at Brigham and Women's Hospital and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. “Shortening the time to effective resuscitation and maximizing post-resuscitation care is critical to patient survival.”

Get With The Guidelines — Resuscitation builds on the work of the American Heart Association’s National Registry of Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation originally launched in 1999 as a database of in-hospital resuscitation events from more than 500 hospitals. Data from the registry and the quality program give participating hospitals feedback on their resuscitation practice and patient outcomes and help develop research-based guidelines for in-hospital resuscitation. For more information, visit www.heart.org/quality.

*Award statistic as of 04/11/2014