Syosset Hospital, part of the North Shore-LIJ Health System, has received the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association’s Get With The Guidelines—Gold Plus and Target: Stroke Honor Roll Elite Quality Achievement Award.
The award recognizes the hospital’s commitment and success ensuring that stroke patients receive the most appropriate treatment according to nationally recognized, research-based guidelines based on the latest scientific evidence.
Syosset Hospital is one of 559 hospitals to be recognized on the Target: Stroke Honor Roll, among the nearly 1,000 hospitals given quality achievement awards.
To receive the award, hospitals must 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. Over 12 months, at least 75 percent of the hospital’s ischemic stroke patients received tPA within 60 minutes of arriving at the hospital (known as door-to-needle time).
These quality measures are designed to help hospital teams provide the most up-to-date, evidence-based guidelines with the goal of speeding recovery and reducing death and disability for stroke patients.
“Syosset Hospital is dedicated to improving the quality of stroke care and The American Heart Association/American Stroke Association’s Get With The Guidelines–Stroke helps us achieve that goal,” said Joseph Garber, MD, Syosset’s director of stroke. “With this award, it demonstrates our commitment to ensure that our patients receive care based on internationally respected clinical guidelines.”
Syosset Hospital has also met specific scientific guidelines as a New York State Department of Health designated stroke center, featuring a sophisticated system for rapid diagnosis and treatment of stroke patients admitted to the emergency department.
“We are pleased to recognize Syosset Hospital for their commitment to stroke care,” said Deepak L. Bhatt, M.D., M.P.H., national chairman of the Get With The Guidelines steering committee and executive director of Interventional Cardiovascular Programs at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. “Studies have shown that hospitals that consistently follow Get With The Guidelines quality improvement measures can reduce length of stay and 30-day readmission rates and reduce disparities in care.”
For providers, Get With The Guidelines–Stroke offers quality-improvement measures, discharge protocols, standing orders and other measurement tools. Providing hospitals with resources and information that make it easier to follow treatment guidelines can help save lives and ultimately reduce overall healthcare costs by lowering readmission rates for stroke patients.
For patients, Get With The Guidelines–Stroke uses the “teachable moment,” the time soon after a patient has had a stroke, when they learn how to manage their risk factors while still in the hospital and recognize the F.A.S.T. warning signs of a stroke.
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 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.
For more information about Syosset Hospital’s stroke program, call 516-496-6550. For more information about Get With The Guidelines, visit www.heart.org/quality or www.heart.org/qualitymap.
