Mat-Su Regional Recognized for Stroke Care Excellence

8/25/2020

Mat-Su Regional Medical Center has earned the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association’s Get with the Guidelines - Stroke Silver Plus Quality Achievement Award. The award recognizes the hospital’s commitment to ensuring stroke patients receive the most appropriate treatment based on the latest scientific evidence.

Healthcare facilities receive the award for meeting quality measures in the diagnosis and treatment of stroke patients. These measures include evaluation of the proper use of medications and other treatments that meet the most current, evidence-based guidelines with the goal of speeding recovery and reducing death and disability for stroke patients.

A stroke occurs when a blood vessel in the brain clogs or bursts, reducing the blood supply to the brain and preventing brain tissue from getting oxygen. Symptoms include trouble speaking, understanding and walking, as well as numbness or paralysis of the arm, face or leg. Millions of brain cells die each minute a stroke is untreated, but many of the long-term disabilities associated with stroke can be avoided if the patient is given clot-busting medication within the critical first few hours after stroke symptoms.

“There is a time-dependent treatment option for people having a stroke and we’re very proud of the fact that we have the ability to provide state-of-the-art stroke treatment in our emergency department,” said Dr. Thomas Quimby, Medical Director of the Emergency Department at Mat-Su Regional.

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 and nearly 795,000 people suffer stroke each year.

At Mat-Su Regional, staff is trained to recognize the signs of a stroke and to respond quickly – treatment needs to take place within a four and a half hour period from the onset of symptoms to minimize brain damage.

“Often we see patients that don’t come in until hour three and that gives us an hour and a half to get the lab work back and CT scans done and get the medication in,” said Kurstin Svoboda, BA, RN, CEN, director of the Emergency Department at Mat-Su Regional. If a patient comes into the Emergency Department as a possible stroke victim they are given a series of tests to determine if they should be put on a neuro alert, which will be followed by a more comprehensive exam to determine whether the patient is put on stroke alert.

“[Neuro alert] gets the physician at the bedside quicker, it gets other staff quicker to respond,” said Svoboda.

Upon stroke alert, the patient receives a CT scan to determine whether they are experiencing the more common Ischemic stroke, due to clotting, or a Hemorrhagic stroke, caused by a ruptured blood vessel.

If the stroke is Ischemic, the patient can be treated with a thrombolytic “clot-buster” medication through IV that reopens the clogged blood vessel; however the drug must be administered within the four and a half hour window to reduce the risk of hemorrhagic transformation, according to Svoboda. If the CT scan shows that the stroke is Hemorrhagic, a thrombolytic can make the bleeding worse.

“For every minute of ischemia, the brain loses 1.9 million neurons and ages 3.1 weeks. For every hour of ischemia, the brain ages 3.6 years and loses 120 million neurons,” said Amber Simonetti, RN, BSN. Simonetti is the Chest Pain and Stroke Care Accreditation Coordinator for at Mat-Su Regional.

That is why getting to the hospital as quickly as possible is vital for reducing and preventing disability due to a stroke, Simonetti added. Learning the signs of a stroke is the first step to saving a life.

Medical professionals developed the BEFAST acronym to quickly identify signs of a stroke:

B: Balance - Does the person have a loss of balance?
E: Eyes - Has the person lost vision in one or both eyes, or had a significant change?
F: Face - Does the person's face look uneven?
A: Arms - Can the person raise both arms for 10 seconds?
S: Speech - Is the person's speech slurred or garbled?
T: Time - Call 911 and take note of what time the symptoms started. Every second counts!

Dr. Thomas Quimby, medical director of the emergency department and Kurstin Svoboda, BA, RN, CEN, director of the emergency department at Mat-Su Regional stand in front of Mat-Su Regional’s ED. Mat-Su Regional was recently recognized by the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association for their commitment to ensuring stroke patients receive the most appropriate treatment based on the latest scientific evidence.

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