St. Christopher's Hospital's ECMO Team Named 2010 Best Nursing Team by ADVANCE for Nurses Magazine

The ECMO (extracorporeal membrane oxygenation) nursing team at St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children was the first place winner in ADVANCE for Nurses magazine’s annual Best Nursing Team Contest in the Philadelphia area.

Dozens of nursing teams from across the tri-state area submitted entry forms, which were evaluated by a panel of three judges for: initiative, adaptability, expertise and outreach.

The 27 nurses on the ECMO team at St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children are featured on the cover of the magazine’s May 10 issue.

“This special honor reflects the excellence of our nursing staff,” says Heidi Baur, M.S., R.N., N.E.-B.C., chief nursing officer of St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children. “Our ECMO nursing team provides the highest level of care for the sickest infants and children at St. Chris and our patient outcomes are a result of the team’s hard work and dedication to continued training. We are proud of this recognition and thank our nurses for their dedication to the patients and families they serve every day.”

ECMO is one of the most advanced forms of life support available to patients experiencing acute failure of the cardio-respiratory system and for many critically ill patients it can be a life-saving treatment.

St. Christopher’s ECMO program has been in place since 2001. It is an intense, multidisciplinary program comprised of specialty nurses, perfusionists, respiratory care practitioners, intensive care physicians, surgeons and neonatologists. A testament to the strength of the program at St. Christopher’s is that more than 92 percent of infants receiving ECMO services for respiratory support at the hospital survive. This is well above the 76 percent national survival rate. St. Christopher’s ECMO team has developed training programs and strategies for reaching performance excellence measures to assure the highest quality of ECMO services and the program.

St. Christopher’s ECMO program has received national recognition and was awarded the “Excellence in Life Support Award” in 2009 from the Extracorporeal Life Support Organization (ELSO), an international consortium of centers offering extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) for support of failing organ systems in infants, children and adults.

ADVANCE for Nurses reaches RNs in 10 regional areas, from New England to California. The biweekly magazine presents articles and features for registered nurses of all specialties, as well as clinical information, local nursing coverage, job opportunities and the latest product news. ADVANCE’s Pennsylvania/New Jersey/Delaware edition circulates to more than 75,000 registered nurses.

Since 1875, St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children has been providing exceptional patient care and advancing new pediatric treatments through research and innovation. Through affiliations with Drexel University College of Medicine and Temple University School of Medicine, St. Christopher’s is a teaching hospital helping to train the next generation of professionals in pediatric medicine.

The 189-bed hospital is committed to delivering high quality family- and patient-centered care to children from throughout the Philadelphia area and around the world. Its highly acclaimed programs include its Level I Pediatric Trauma Center; Level IIIC NICU, which is the highest NICU designation; Heart Center, Oncology/Transplant; as well as its Burn Center, which is the only dedicated pediatric burn center in the area. In 2009, St. Christopher’s achieved Magnet status, which is one of the nation's highest forms of recognition for nursing excellence, and numerous St. Chris physicians were recognized in regional publications as being “Top Docs” in their fields.

To learn more about St. Christopher’s, visit www.stchristophershospital.com. St. Christopher’s can also be found on Facebook at www.facebook.com/StChrisHospital or on Twitter at http://twitter.com/stchrishospital.

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