For Immediate Release                                      Contact: Jan Embry

 March 1, 2007                                              706-485-2711, Ext. 338

Putnam General Hospital Achieves Gold Standard

for Excellence in Patient Care

ATLANTA – When it comes to choosing a hospital, quality counts, and Putnam General Hospital proves it’s among the best with a recent honor from the Georgia Hospital Association’s  (GHA) long standing Performance Measurement System, CARE. The 25-bed hospital in Eatonton earned a “Top CARE Hospital” award, GHA’s gold standard for excellence in patient care, for maintaining its standing in the top quartile of its peer group for at least three years.

The award represents Putnam General’s outstanding achievement and sustained improvement and performance in six key areas of clinical quality, patient safety and financial management.

“The CARE hospital award is reflective of Putnam General Hospital’s commitment to providing safe, effective, patient-centered care,” said GHA Executive Vice President Vi Naylor. “The hospital’s leadership and staff have worked together to create a culture that emphasizes both clinical excellence and operational efficiency. They have set high standards for the hospital community by consistently delivering outstanding patient care while reducing costs and improving resource utilization.”

CARE hospital award-winners are selected based on statistical analysis of quality and cost data regularly submitted to CARE for reporting and benchmarking purposes. The analysis measures both processes, or how well the hospital delivers care, and outcomes, or results of that care. The hospital’s performance is compared with other hospitals within its peer group and across the state. Data from each of the six quality measure areas are then aggregated into a single, numeric score representing the hospital’s three years of continuous quality improvement.

 “Ensuring patient safety and quality of care is a part of everyone’s job at Putnam General,” said Administrator Darrell Oglesby. “We are proud of our staff’s work in this area and are honored to receive this prestigious award from CARE in acknowledgement of our efforts. We see this award not as an end point but as an important milestone in an ongoing journey. We must be vigilant and continuously strive to identify proven, evidence-based practices that will enable us to provide the safest environment and best possible care for our community.”

The CARE Program began in 1992 with a grant from the Robert Woodruff Foundation in response to member needs for comparative data for benchmarking and quality improvement. Since that time, hundreds of volunteers have devoted thousands of hours to developing the performance assessment indicators and report formats that are currently used in the CARE program.

About GHA

Established in 1929, GHA is the state’s largest trade organization of hospitals and health systems providing education, research and risk management services to its more than 180 hospital and health system members. Additionally, it represents and advocates health policy issues benefiting Georgia’s citizens before the state legislature and U.S. Congress as well as before regulatory bodies.