First celebrated in 1933, National Doctors’ Day is an annual holiday honoring physicians for their compassion, integrity, and dedication to patient care and medical advancements. At RQI Partners, we are proud to celebrate this holiday by highlighting two physicians who have pioneered and championed resuscitation excellence through research and advocacy.
Dr. Benjamin Abella
Benjamin S. Abella, MD, MPhil, is a national leader in the study of sudden cardiac arrest and cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and serves as the Chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine for the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the Mount Sinai Health System.
Dr. Abella has served as Chair of the American Heart Association (AHA) national 3CPR Council and has created international guidelines for resuscitation care through his work with the AHA. He is the emergency care and CPR consultant to the National Basketball Association, and has worked with the United States Air Force in the development of post-arrest care protocols. In Philadelphia, he has led a longstanding community-based CPR training program for disadvantaged communities, which has trained more than 10,000 people in CPR delivery.
As one of the first investigators to develop quantitative methods to measure and assess CPR delivery, Dr. Abella has played a key role in helping to advance defibrillator technology to improve CPR performance. He has led numerous clinical studies on cardiac arrest and post-arrest care and has authored more than 280 published studies in leading medical journals. Below are some of his recently-published studies:
Dr. Lance Becker
Lance Becker, MD, FAHA is an investigator at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research and serves as the chair and professor of emergency medicine at the Zucker School of Medicine, and chair of the emergency departments at North Shore University Hospital and Long Island Jewish Medical Center.
Dr. Becker is an internationally-recognized leader in the field of resuscitation, cardiac arrest, and critical care. His most impactful publications included outcomes such as creation of the the Utstein international nomenclature for resuscitation, the original description of the three-phase model of cardiac arrest, reporting disparities in rates of cardiac arrest for minority populations, reappraisal of mouth-to-mouth ventilation, the instillation of AED’s in public settings, ischemia/reperfusion physiology, mitochondrial and metabolic approaches to resuscitation, and the critical descriptions of real-time quality of CPR measures during human cardiac arrest.
At the national level, Dr. Becker has publicly advocated for NIH funding for resuscitation research as a leader of the PULSE Initiative that created multiple RFAs totaling over 150M dollars toward research in the last decade. He co-founded and chaired the American Heart Association’s Resuscitation Science Symposium which is the leading international venue for presentation of cutting edge resuscitation science, has served as chair of the AHA’s Peer Review subcommittee, chair of the Basic Life Support Committee, chair of the Cardiopulmonary, Perioperative, and Resuscitation Council, and helped establish the International Liaison Committee on Resuscitation (ILCOR) now responsible for the world’s recommendations on resuscitation practices.
Additionally, Dr. Becker is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine and National Academy of Medicine (IOM/NAM) has been a leader within the IOM/NAM efforts to improve survival from cardiac arrest. Below are some of his recently-published studies:
