ACS Bulletin - October 2017

this care in an environment
with resources optimal for
his/her individual needs.”
“A large portion of children’s
surgical care is provided in
nonspecialized environments
in the U.S. today,” he added.

“A specialized environment is associated with better clinical outcomes for some patients,” especially neonates and children needing operations for congenital heart conditions and trauma, as well as some relatively simple pediatric surgical problems, such as appendicitis in children ages five and younger.

The overriding principle of the CSV is tiered accreditation for hospitals, much like the system used to accredit trauma centers; that is, Level III centers would be accredited only to provide low-risk procedures by single specialty, whereas Level I centers would be verified as meeting the program’s standards for complex procedures and diseases that require multidisciplinary care. The program officially launched in January.

Geriatric surgery

“Starting in 2012, 10,000 people will turn 65 each day. By 2030,

20 percent of the population will be over 65 years old, and by

2050, nearly 20 million people
will be older than 85 years of
age,” said Ronnie A. Rosenthal,
MS, MD, FACS, Co-Principal
Investigator, the Coalition for
Quality in Geriatric Surgery
(CQGS) Project. “More than

50 percent of people older
than 65 years old will require
some surgical procedure in the
remainder of their lifetime.”
With this awareness in
mind, the ACS and other
stakeholders established the
CQGS with funding from The
John A. Hartford Foundation.

The goals of the CQGS are to engage stakeholders, set standards, develop measures that matter to patients, develop a verification process to ensure quality, educate patients and providers, pilot the program, and launch a Geriatric Surgery Quality Campaign. Stakeholder organizations represent patients and families, advocacy and regulatory bodies, health care professionals, and medical and surgical specialties.

The CQGS has conducted
field visits at 11 hospitals in seven
U.S. cities, said Dr. Rosenthal,
Co-Chair of the CQGS Standards
Subcommittee. More than 100
hospital administrators, quality
and safety team members,
frontline providers, care
transition team members, and
patient navigators participated
in interviews. The CQGS found
that all of these providers share
the perception that older adults
require special care, but they were
unclear what that meant. The
subcommittee recently began
beta testing standards of care.

Keynote Address: Resilience

According to Susan D. Moffat-Bruce, MD, PhD, FACS, professor of surgery, division of thoracic surgery, and professor of biomedical informatics and molecular virology, immunology, and medical genetics, The Ohio State University, Columbus, resilience is the ability to experience a significant loss and find a way to make something good come of it.

An individual who exemplifies resilience, she said, is Blake Haxton, JD, who lost both of his legs to necrotizing fasciitis.

During his keynote address, Mr. Haxton described his journey from going to the local hospital’s emergency department with debilitating swelling and redness in his right leg to reclaiming his identity. After more than three months of intensive treatment and rehabilitation, Mr. Haxton had defied the odds and proven his body’s resilience throughout the ordeal. The question now was, what would someone who had previously