BERWYN, PA - The Berwyn Fire Company has received the Pennsylvania CARES Award. The award acknowledges the agency’s dedication to collecting out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) data for quality improvement purposes. The agency is one of 145 EMS agencies across the Commonwealth honored by Pennsylvania CARES during October in observance of Sudden Cardiac Arrest Awareness Month.

Each year, more than 350,000 people in the United States experience an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. By participating in Pennsylvania CARES, Berwyn Fire Company demonstrates commitment to saving lives by strengthening the links in the OHCA chain of survival.

Pennsylvania CARES is a statewide partner of the Cardiac Arrest Registry to Enhance Survival (CARES), a national cardiac arrest registry that allows communities to measure bystander and 911 response, including information about bystander CPR and AED application, telephone CPR, and EMS response. Using this information, EMS agencies can discover promising practices and implement new programs to improve emergency care for patients in their communities, and participation in a national registry is recommended by the Institute of Medicine.

Recipients of this year’s Pennsylvania CARES Award successfully participated in the registry for the 2018 calendar year and are commended for collecting data, in collaboration with and on behalf of BLS, first responder, and community partners, to measure outcomes, improve the quality of care, and save lives.

The Berwyn Fire Company’s dedication to collecting OHCA data has helped strengthen the collaboration between 911 centers, first responders, EMS agencies and hospitals, with the ultimate goal to improve OHCA survival rates. For more information on CARES and the benefits of cardiac arrest data collection, please visit the national CARES website https://mycares.net and see the Pennsylvania CARES program website https://smemsc.org/index.php/programareas/138-2/. More information about sudden cardiac arrest is available from the CDC at https://www.cdc.gov/dhdsp/docs/cardiac-arrest-infographic.pdf