Delaware Valley Stroke Council Extends STEP to Four More Hospitals
July 29, 2003 - The Philadelphia Stroke Council (PSC) announced
today that a pilot program designed to improve acute stroke care is now entering
its third year. The Stroke Treatment Enhancement Program (STEP), developed by
DVSC in conjunction with the National Stroke Association (www.stroke.org)
and AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals (www.astrazeneca-us.com),
brought state-of-the-art stroke care to five Delaware Valley hospitals in the
last three years. To date, twelve area hospitals have been through the STEP
program.
"Stroke affects 14,000 people in our area a year but STEP
is setting a new standard for stroke care locally and nationally," says
PSC Executive Director Bunny Hare citing figures from a national data tracking
system known as Ethos™ (www.thestrokegroup.com/ethos/index.html)
that show that STEP hospitals are three times more likely to use the miracle
"clot-busting" drug t-PA.
The hospitals enrolled in STEP 2003 are Riddle Memorial Hospital
in Media, PA (www.riddlehospital.org);
Our Lady of Lourdes Medical Center (www.lourdesnet.org)
in Camden and Willingboro, NJ; Central Montgomery Medical Center in Lansdale,
PA (www.cmmc-uhs.com);
and Underwood Memorial Hospital in Woodbury, NJ (www.umhospital.org).
To be included a hospital must commit to 24-hour-a-day on-call coverage by a
neurologist for the emergency room and have MRI equipment and a technician available
24-7.
Topics covered in the program include the use of the NIH stroke
scale, when and how to administer t-PA, as well as Ethos' value for providing
care benchmarks. Most training is done on-site by a pair of professionals from
DVSC's Medical Board that includes a stroke neurologist and a stroke nurse chosen
by Dr. Rodney Bell, Chair of DVSC's Medical Board and Director of the Stroke
Center at Jefferson University Hospital.
In the pilot program in 2002 the trainers worked with Nazareth
(www.nazarethhospital.org)
and Mercy (www.mercyhealth.org)
in Philadelphia; Virtua in Burlington, NJ (www.virtua.org),
Crozer-Chester of Upland, PA (www.crozer.org)
; and Doylestown Hospital in Bucks County (www.dh.org)
to create emergency room stroke teams that deliver faster and more comprehensive
care. Community education was also stressed to communicate that stroke is a
medical emergency and that immediate treatment stands the best chance of mitigating
its effects. Stroke is the number one cause of adult disability.
Added in 2004, Chestnut Hill Hospital, Chestnut Hill, PA (www.chh.org).
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