Pediatric Cardiac Critical Care Collaborative Credited with Saving Lives and Preventing Cardiac Arrests in Children with Critical Heart Disease

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The Pediatric Cardiac Critical Care Consortium (PC4) announced today remarkable progress in improving outcomes in children with critical heart disease. At the 16th Annual International Meeting of the Pediatric Cardiac Intensive Care Society, both physicians and hospital administrators applauded PC4 for the impact of the collaborative on preventing cardiac arrest and saving children's lives.

The average person is often unaware of the significance of congenital heart disease.  Congenital heart disease impacts 1 in 100 children born each year, with most of them needing open-heart surgery and a stay in the intensive care unit to survive.  One in 12 newborns suffers a cardiac arrest after open heart surgery and only half survive.

Speaking this week at the Pediatric Cardiac Intensive Care Society meeting, Kay Stewart-Huey, Vice President of the Children's Heart Center at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta, praised PC4.  "Through participation in the PC4 Cardiac Arrest Prevention national collaborative we were able to reduce our incidence of cardiac arrest.  PC4 enables hospitals to improve the quality of their clinical care by facilitating comparison of many outcomes with other high performing centers and sharing best practices with one another." 

PC4 started in 2013, just five hospitals with a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and an overarching goal to improve the experience, care and outcomes for these vulnerable children with heart disease.  PC4 has now grown to over 60 intensive care units across North America.  PC4 hospitals believe in collaborative learning as a way to improve the care of patients and families fighting critical cardiovascular disease. This includes sharing best practices, promoting teamwork, working together on innovative projects, and communicating important findings across hospitals.  Applying these practices across intensive care units, PC4 has recently reported saving over 160 lives and reducing the incidence of cardiac arrest by nearly half.

Launched with funding from the University of Michigan, the organization has made considerable contributions to the medical field, including over 30 publications in the past 5 years.  For the first time, PC4 is reaching out to the community to help give hope to families of children with heart disease. 

Dr. Sarah Tabbutt, the Executive Director of PC4, and a cardiac intensive care doctor at the University of California San Francisco Benioff Children's Hospital, says the organization has made so much progress, but will need generosity to help discover more ways to improve outcomes in these fragile children.  "We have created such a robust infrastructure and collaboration within PC4, that we really can answer questions which were previously un-answerable."  PC4 is already underway on several important initiatives directed at shortening the time in the hospital, avoiding unexpected additional procedures, equalizing care across race/ethnicity, and reducing pain and anxiety after open-heart surgery.  "The PC4 community is passionate about finding ways not only to improve care, but to give a brighter future to these children and their families."  PC4 has a fundraising site where you can see heartwarming stories in addition to details of upcoming projects that donations will help fund.

PC4 fundraising site: https://give.communityfunded.com/o/michigan-medicine/i/pc4/s/pc4

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Press Kit: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1RJ4WuspeOACfhWe_zHQ4LwjcSBJTXqX9?usp=sharing

Embedded Video: https://youtu.be/YEkNI4OqGfI 

References:
Saving lives
Preventing cardiac arrest

Press Contact:
Name: David Werho, MD
Email: [email protected]
Phone: 734-232-3811

SOURCE Pediatric Cardiac Critical Care Consortium (PC4)

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