Clifton Springs Hospital & Clinic (CSHC) and Newark-Wayne Community Hospital (NWCH) have achieved “Level one—Comprehensive Excellence” verification status from the Geriatric Surgery Verification Program (GSV), a quality program of the American College of Surgeons (ACS).
A hospital with level one verification status recognizes its commitment to providing optimal care for its older adult surgical patients by meeting the GSV’s program standards. GSV program verification is granted only to those hospitals that are dedicated to providing the best possible surgical care for older adults.
To attain this level of verification, GSV program standards must be in place and verified across one or more surgical specialties and must reach 50% or more of the hospital’s total population of eligible surgical patients aged 75 years or older. These standards ensure that older adults undergoing surgery receive care under a multidisciplinary program with quality improvement and safety processes, data collection, and appropriate resources provided to them as patients at the hospital.
Only five hospitals in the country have achieved this level verification status from the GSV program — three are in the RRH system. Unity Hospital achieved it in 2020, and now CSHC and NWCH are also the only rural hospitals to obtain the same verification.
In order to become verified, CSHC and NWCH participated in a site review process by an ACS team of reviewers consisting of experienced experts in geriatric care who reviewed the hospital’s structure, process and clinical outcomes data. The current standards document, “Optimal Resources for Geriatric Surgery,” drives the application and is used as a guideline in the review.
“Attaining level one GSV designation is a major achievement for not only Newark Wayne and Clifton Springs Hospitals, but also for the American College of Surgeons,” said physician Matthew Schiralli, director of the geriatric program and Rochester Regional Health’s chief of surgery, Eastern Region. “With these hospital verifications we have proven that ACS-sponsored quality care programs can be effectively rolled out in small and rural hospitals in addition to the larger ones where they were developed. A new standard of surgical care for the elderly has been created at Newark and Clifton, raising the bar for everyone.”