Mayo Clinic's St. Luke's Hospital to receive Organ Donation Medal of Honor

Wednesday, May 18, 2005

JACKSONVILLE, Fla., May 18, 2005 — The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Health Resources and Services Administration, will award the first Organ Donation Medals of Honor to hospitals achieving outstanding rates for organ donation in a ceremony May 19 in Pittsburgh. Mayo Clinic's St. Luke's Hospital is one of 184 hospitals to receive the prestigious Medal of Honor for achieving an organ donation rate of 75 percent or higher during a 12-month period.

The ceremony is part of the Organ Donation Breakthrough Collaborative, an HHS initiative launched in 2003. Its goal is to increase organ donation rates in the top donor hospitals across the country and ultimately increase the number of lives saved through organ transplantation.

To be eligible for the Medal of Honor, hospitals must have at least eight eligible donors in a single, continuous 12-month period between September 2003 and March 2005. There were 532 hospitals eligible for the award.

To win the award, hospitals and organ procurement organizations (OPOs) must successfully collaborate to convert at least 75 percent of these eligible donors to actual donors. For perspective, the national average donation rate in all hospitals was 55 percent in 2004.

The hospitals and OPOs receiving this award are being honored for their exemplary leadership and commitment to organ donors, donor families and the nearly 88,000 patients on the national transplant waiting list. They also are being honored for the effective relationships they have developed with each other that have generated these life-saving results.

As a result of the Organ Donation Breakthrough Collaborative and other national organ donation initiatives, organ donation rates increased by an unprecedented 10.8 percent in 2004, resulting in more than 27,000 organ transplants performed. Results thus far for the first four months of 2005 are breaking each of the monthly records established in 2004.

So far this year Mayo Clinic transplant teams have performed 153 solid organ transplants at St. Luke's Hospital.

For more information, please call:

Mayo Clinic's St. Luke's Hospital Public Relations
(904) 953-2299

LifeQuest Public Relations
(352) 338-7133 or (800) 535-4483
www.LifeQuestFla.org

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Mayo Clinic is a multispecialty medical clinic in Jacksonville, Fla. The staff includes 313 physicians working in more than 40 specialties to provide diagnosis, treatment and surgery. Patients who need hospitalization are admitted to nearby St. Luke's Hospital, a 289-bed Mayo facility. Mayo Clinics also are located in Rochester, Minn., and Arizona. Visit www.MayoClinic.org/news for all the news from Mayo Clinic.

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