Gold Beacon Award reflects years of exceptional, consistent nursing care across ECMC

Award-winning nursing care isn’t built on isolated instances of effective service. It’s the result of consistent, superior care, enabled by collaboration and sacrifice from a team singularly focused on the welfare of its patients.

For a unit to secure a Gold Beacon Award for Excellence—bestowed by the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses (AACN), isa major industry acknowledgement of exceptional, patient-first care—its service can’t simply be a snapshot of best-in-class service. It needs to set a standard for its region and boast care the community can count on, day after day.

It’s not an easy task, but this fall, ECMC nursing earned individual Gold Beacon awards for its Medical Intensive Care Unit (MICU) staff at its North and South locations. The honors are the result of three years of consistent service and sustainment—including a transition of care from the COVID-19 pandemic and into present-day needs—and considers such measurables as patient outcomes and staff engagement and retention.

After judging all facets of its nursing services, AACN has deemed ECMC as a provider of the highest quality of nursing care to its patients, with impressive outcomes not only within Western New York, but against the highest standards established across the U.S.

This acknowledgement is a great honor. But according to Vice President of Critical Care and Emergency Services Meg Reilly, the nursing staff at ECMC has never stopped at just being great. They’ve wanted to be Gold.

“We’ve earned the Silver Beacon before, but we wanted to persevere to be even better for those who count on us the most,” says Reilly, who joined ECMC in 2021. “We serve a very marginalized population here, and our work with these community members is one of the things we’re most proud of. We insist on not just caring for those who are underserved, but providing these community members with the best care possible.”

The ability to provide this exceptional level of care is a tremendous asset to Erie County and it’s community members. However, being recognized as Gold Beacon award winners isn’t as simple as achieving superiority in a specific aspect of critical care. According to Reilly, the criteria for achieving recognition from the AACN is incredibly difficult, with excellence demanded in such realms as frontline engagement, interdisciplinary and interprofessional collaboration, and open communication between department leadership and bedside staff. ECMC has been exemplary of each, leaning on it’s nursing team to lead the way.

“Nurses are leaders at the bedside [of patients],” says Reilly. “They drive quality of care. We at ECMC believe in this very strongly, and our medical decisions are based on the feedback of frontline staff.”

But to earn Gold recognition this level of care needs to be sustained. Over a period of 2020 to 2023, ECMC’s nursing team either adhered to or exceeded industry benchmarks concerning patient outcomes, work environment, and operation of its workforce. This consistency is an extraordinary takeaway from impressive recognition, and something that required commitment from every individual across two MICU teams.

“This isn’t as simple as one good year of work. It’s positive outcomes and improvement, year after year,” says Martha Metz, MS, RN clinical nursing specialist within ECMC’s Critical Care and Emergency Services. “We can’t just have one good year of patient care. We must have a good year, then a better year, then an even better year. To be honored for this for two separate units within one organization shows that we’re not only reaching our benchmarks, but we’re exceeding and improving on them.”

Achieving such sustainable success and continuous improvement would be challenging throughout any years. But for ECMC, part of their measurement period was amid the generational challenge of the COVID-19 pandemic. It was a time that debilitated the healthcare industry and medical professionals across the globe. For ECMC MICU staff at both North and South locations to emerge strong, stable, and ready to excel speaks to the strength of the teams in place—and their ability to work as one.

“After rebounding from the difficulties of COVID, our staff and leadership agreed that we had to get back to business, and back to the national standard [of care],” says Metz. “The resilience shown by our staff—and the engagement with and desire to do what’s best for our patients—is the common factor between our award-winning teams at North and South.”

Now, after achieving nationally laudable standards for patient care, ECMC’s nursing staff stands as the standard of care for Western New York. Reilly and Metz both celebrate this, as do their teams that made two Gold Beacons possible. Both are validation for service that strives to be better than yesterday, and the sacrifices made for patients and their families, day after day.

“Everybody wants to work where they’re valuable, where they’re appreciated, and where their leadership treats them like that,” says Reilly. “ECMC is this type of place, and these awards symbolize the critical nature of our work—and our commitment to this community.”

To learn more about ECMC’s award-winning services, click here.