Jacksonville, Fla. (PRWEB) June 01, 2016
Baptist Medical Center Jacksonville has received the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association’s Get With The Guidelines®-Stroke Gold Plus Quality Achievement Award with Target: StrokeSM Honor Roll Elite.
The award recognizes the hospital’s commitment to providing the most appropriate stroke treatment according to nationally recognized, research-based guidelines based on the latest scientific evidence. Hospitals must achieve 85 percent or higher adherence to all Get With The Guidelines-Stroke achievement indicators for two or more consecutive 12-month periods and achieve 75 percent or higher compliance with five of eight Get With The Guidelines-Stroke Quality measures to receive the Gold Plus Quality Achievement Award.
“Stroke is a tremendous burden to our community. This award recognizes Baptist Health’s investment to stroke care and our continued efforts to provide the best stroke care in the region,” said neurovascular surgeon Ricardo Hanel, MD, PhD, director of the Baptist Neurological Institute.
“Our dedicated team at Baptist Jacksonville is committed to providing the most advanced, minimally invasive procedures for stroke, aneurysm and other conditions in state-of-the-art facilities,” added Eric Sauvageau, MD, neurovascular surgeon and director of the Stroke & Cerebrovascular Center at Baptist Jacksonville.
To qualify for the Target: Stroke Honor Roll Elite, hospitals must also meet 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. If given intravenously in the first three hours after the start of stroke symptoms, tPA has been shown to significantly reduce the effects of stroke and lessen the chance of permanent disability. Baptist Jacksonville earned the award by meeting specific quality achievement measures for the diagnosis and treatment of stroke patients at a set level for a designated period.
“Research has shown that there are benefits to patients who are treated at hospitals that have adopted the Get With The Guidelines program,” said Paul Heidenreich, M.D., M.S., national chairman of the Get With The Guidelines Steering Committee and Professor of Medicine at Stanford University.
These quality measures are designed to help hospital teams follow the most up-to-date, evidence-based guidelines with the goal of speeding recovery and reducing death and disability for stroke patients.
“This recognition further demonstrates Baptist Health’s commitment to delivering advanced stroke treatments to patients quickly and safely,” added Michael Mayo, Baptist Jacksonville hospital president.
Mike McEvoy, 66, of Neptune Beach, had a stroke last fall while waiting for his brother who was in spine surgery at Baptist Jacksonville. McEvoy was in the café and started to show signs of a stroke, including one side of his face drooping and weakness on the side of his body. Medical staff and Baptist team members nearby immediately came to his aide.
An emergency room team took him on a stretcher to the emergency room just yards away. Advanced imaging showed he was suffering a stroke due to a large brain vessel occlusion. He was given the clot-buster medication (tPA) and immediately taken to the nearby Neuro operating room. Dr. Hanel removed his clot through a minimally invasive procedure and use of a new aspiration catheter which goes through a small incision in the groin up to the brain as part of many stroke research studies being conducted at Baptist. McEvoy calls it a miracle and divine intervention.
“If this happened at home or somewhere else, it would have been a different story. I wouldn’t have made it. I’m just so thankful to Baptist,” McEvoy said.
A stroke patient loses 1.9 million neurons each minute stroke treatment is delayed. According to the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association, stroke is the No. 5 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, someone dies of a stroke every four minutes, and nearly 800,000 people suffer a new or recurrent stroke each year.
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About Baptist Health
Baptist Health is a faith-based, mission-driven system in Northeast Florida comprised of Baptist Medical Center Jacksonville; Baptist Medical Center Beaches; Baptist Medical Center Nassau; Baptist Medical Center South; Baptist Clay Medical Campus and Wolfson Children’s Hospital – the region’s only children’s hospital. All Baptist Health hospitals, along with Baptist Home Health Care, have achieved Magnet™ status for excellence in patient care. Baptist Health is part of Coastal Community Health, a regional affiliation between Baptist Health, Flagler Hospital and Southeast Georgia Health System forming a highly integrated hospital network focused on significant initiatives designed to enhance the quality and value of care provided to our contiguous communities. Baptist Health has the area’s only dedicated heart hospital; orthopedic institute; women’s services; neurological institute, including comprehensive neurosurgical services, a comprehensive stroke center and two primary stroke centers; a Bariatric Center of Excellence; a full range of psychology and psychiatry services; urgent care services; and primary and specialty care physicians’ offices throughout Northeast Florida. The Baptist MD Anderson Cancer Center is a regional destination for multidisciplinary cancer care which is clinically integrated with the MD Anderson Cancer Center, the internationally renowned cancer treatment and research institution in Houston. For more details, visit baptistjax.com.
About Get With The Guidelines®
Get With The Guidelines® is the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association’s hospital-based quality improvement program that provides hospitals with tools and resources to increase adherence to the latest research-based guidelines. Developed with the goal of saving lives and hastening recovery, Get With The Guidelines has touched the lives of more than 6 million patients since 2001. For more information, visit heart.org.