Email this pageQuality Measures for Pneumonia
Pneumonia is a lung infection with symptoms such as coughing, fever, and difficulty breathing. Patients with severe pneumonia, and pneumonia in patients who are elderly, have weak immune systems or other diseases and may require hospitalization.
Experts at Strong use a team approach in caring for patients with pneumonia. This includes board-certified or board-eligible specialists in lung problems (pulmonologists), critical care, and infectious diseases. Nurses and support staff, who are specially trained to care for the most complicated, critically ill patients, are also a key part of the care team.
Patients with severe pneumonia may be cared for in an intensive care unit (ICU). Strong’s ICUs are staffed around-the-clock with specialists called intensivists, doctors who specialize in the care of critically ill and injured patients.
As a regional referral center serving Upstate New York, Strong accepts many patients from other hospitals when they require more complex care than is available in their community hospital.
At Strong, an innovative Respiratory Special Care Unit provides care when patients are ready to leave the ICU but still need close monitoring as they transition off of ventilators. The Respiratory Special Care Unit recently earned a Board Excellence Award for superior teamwork and continuous commitment to improvement, problem-solving, and patient satisfaction. It is considered a model for excellence, providing an alternative to the ICU setting and offering a sense of continuity to a complex patient population that frequently faces long stays in the hospital.
In addition to caring for patients, our experts train the pulmonary and critical care specialists who serve patients throughout Upstate New York, through a grant provided by the National Institutes of Health, which is in its 30th year.
Quality initiatives have made Strong a leader in reducing pneumonias in patients on ventilators, a deadly problem that plagues hospitals across the country.
Pneumonia Rate Plummets in Adult ICU
By consistently implementing a series of steps, staff in Strong’s Medical Intensive Care Unit discovered a solution to a deadly problem that plagues hospitals throughout the U.S. In less than a year, Strong’s ICU team virtually eliminated ventilator-associated pneumonias, a complication that drives up ICU length-of-stay and mortality.
National studies estimate that between 10 and 65% of patients on ventilators get ventilator-associated pneumonias, with mortality reported as high as 55%.
The solution involved vigorously following a set of specific practices that were shown to improve patient outcomes. These practices became a checklist that is completed during daily rounds on the unit. After just one year, the results were dramatic, reducing the time patients spent on ventilators, the length of their stay in the ICU, and the mortality rate.
Strong Memorial Hospital is one of only 14 hospitals in the country cited by the Institute of Healthcare Improvement (IHI) for effectively eliminating ventilator-associated pneumonia, a common and sometimes fatal infection. IHI, a non-profit organization advocating reform in healthcare institutions worldwide, recognized hospitals that had not reported a case of ventilator-associated pneumonia for at least one year in a specific intensive care unit or throughout the hospital. Read more...
Nurses Win Excellence Award
The American Association of Critical Care Nurses named Strong Memorial Hospital’s Medical Intensive Care Unit team a winner of the Baxter Excellence in Patient Safety Award for implementing a program to reduce the cases of ventilator-associated pneumonia. The American Association of Critical Care Nurses is the world’s largest specialty nursing organization. Strong is one of three national winners of the 2006 honor, which is one of the association’s Circle of Excellence awards.