Children's Oakland CF Center wins 2012 Quality Care Award from Cystic Fibrosis Foundation

Children's Hospital & Research Center Oakland's Cystic Fibrosis Center was recently awarded the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation's 2012 Quality Care Award. This prestigious award recognizes cystic fibrosis (CF) centers committed to improving the quality of patient care and providing better health outcomes for people with the life-threatening genetic disease. Children's Hospital Oakland was among 4 out of 22 centers in the country to receive the CF Foundation's award.

Children's Hospital Oakland's CF center was selected for the award for its continuous attention to quality in education, respiratory care, and infection control, and a high performance during a rigorous, 2 day site visit to the center last year by the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.

The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation sends a team to personally visit its 118 centers across the country every five years for accreditation and part of that survey is measuring a center's quality improvement. Children's Hospital Oakland's team has demonstrated significant improvement in working with patients and families to develop personalized daily care plans, providing tools and resources to patients and families, improving the flow of the CF clinic, initiating an innovative infection control policy to decrease the number and types of infections in their patients and standardizing physician's order sets for hospitalized patients.

Cystic fibrosis affects an estimated 30,000 people in the United States with more than 1,000 new diagnoses each year. Children's Hospital Oakland's CF clinic cares for about 100 patients with the chronic disease from birth to young adulthood. Formerly considered a childhood disease because few children survived, CF patients are now expected to live into their 40s.

"Our care for these patients has changed tremendously in the last few decades," said Karen Hardy, MD, medical director of Children's Oakland's CF clinic and the division of Pulmonary Medicine. "Advanced research has led to diagnosis at birth through newborn screening and the development of new treatments that are keeping children healthier and out of the hospital."