American Heart Association award recognizes Wesley’s commitment to quality stroke care
WICHITA – Wesley Healthcare has received the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association’s Get With The Guidelines®-Stroke Gold Plus Quality Achievement Award. This year’s award marks the fifth consecutive year Wesley has been recognized for its excellent treatment of stroke patients.
The Get With the Guidelines – Stroke program provides hospital teams the most up-to-date, research-based guidelines with the goal of speeding recovery and reducing death and disability for stroke patients. The program has touched the lives of more than six million patients since 2001, officials said.
“A stroke patient loses approximately two million neurons each minute stroke treatment is delayed,” said Cindy Murphy, Wesley’s stroke program coordinator. “This recognition further demonstrates our staff’s commitment to delivering advanced stroke treatments to patients quickly and safely.”
Wesley earned the award by achieving a minimum of 24 consecutive months of 85 percent or greater adherence to all Get With The Guidelines – Stroke quality indictors and by achieving at least 75 percent or greater compliance with five out of eight stroke quality measures during that same time period. Measurement indicators include aggressive use of medications and smoking cessation education.
Wesley also received the association’s Target Stroke℠ Honor Roll award. To quality for this recognition, Wesley met specific quality measures developed to reduce the time between the patient’s arrival at the hospital and treatment with the clot-buster tissue plasminogen activator, or tPA, the only drug approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to treat ischemic stroke.
“We are pleased to recognize Wesley for their commitment to stroke care,” said Eric Smith, MD, national chairman of the Get With The Guidelines Steering Committee and an associate professor of neurology at the University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada. “Research has shown that hospitals adhering to clinical measures through the Get With The Guidelines quality improvement initiative often see fewer readmission and lower mortality rates.”
According to the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association, stroke is the fifth cause of death and a leading cause of adult disability in the United States. On average, someone in the U.S. suffers a stroke every 40 seconds and nearly 795,000 people suffer a new or recurrent stroke each year.