Mountain View, CA - November 29, 2012 - El Camino Hospital today announced that it has received the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association's Get With The Guidelines®-Stroke Gold Plus Quality Achievement Award. This annual award recognizes El Camino Hospital's commitment and success in implementing excellent care for stroke patients, according to evidence-based guidelines.
"Achieving this prestigious honor for yet another year shows that the evidence-based protocols our clinicians are using to treat stroke are having a measurable and positive impact on patient outcomes," said Tomi Ryba chief executive officer, El Camino Hospital. "We are grateful to the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association for not only recognizing our efforts, but also for being important partners in stroke treatment since Get With The Guidelines was launched nearly 10 years ago."
"We are proud of this achievement and extend our congratulations to our excellent nursing staff, the hospitalists and the on call neurologists," added Peter Fung, MD, medical director, El Camino Hospital Stroke Center.
El Camino Hospital achieved 85 percent or higher adherence to all Get With The Guidelines-Stroke Quality Achievement indicators for two or more consecutive 12-month intervals and achieved 75 percent or higher compliance with six of 10 Get With The Guidelines-Stroke Quality Measures, which are reporting initiatives to measure quality of care. These measures include aggressive use of medications, such as antithrombotics, anticoagulation therapy, deep vein thrombosis prophylaxis, cholesterol reducing drugs and smoking cessation, all aimed at reducing death and disability and improving the lives of stroke patients.
"El Camino Hospital is to be commended for its commitment to implementing standards of care and protocols for treating stroke patients," said Lee H. Schwamm, M.D., chair of the Get with the Guidelines National Steering Committee and director of the TeleStroke and Acute Stroke Services at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. "The full implementation of acute care and secondary prevention recommendations and guidelines is a critical step in saving the lives and improving outcomes of stroke patients."
In addition to the Get With The Guideline-Stroke award, El Camino Hospital has also been recognized as a recipient of the association's Target: Stroke Honor Roll, for improving stroke care. Over the past quarter, at least 50 percent of the hospital's eligible ischemic stroke patients have received tissue plasminogen activator, or tPA, within 60 minutes of arriving at the hospital (known as ‘door-to-needle' time). If given intravenously in the first three hours after the start of stroke symptoms, tPA has been shown to significantly reverse the effects of stroke and reduce permanent disability.
According to the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association, stroke is one of the leading causes of death and serious, long-term disability in the United States. On average, someone suffers a stroke every 40 seconds; someone dies of a stroke every four minutes; and 795,000 people suffer a new or recurrent stroke each year.