Redlands Community Hospital receives Get with the Guidelines-Stroke Gold Plus Quality Achievement Award

Redlands Community Hospital has received the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association’s 2019 Get With The Guidelines^®-Stroke Gold Plus Quality Achievement Award and also qualified for recognition on the Target: Stroke^SM Honor Roll. The award recognizes the hospital’s commitment and success in implementing a high standard of stroke care by ensuring stroke patients receive treatment that meets nationally accepted, evidence-based standards and recommendations. This is the fourth consecutive year that Redlands Community Hospital has earned the gold level recognition.

Hospitals receiving Get With The Guidelines Gold Plus Achievement Award have reached an aggressive goal of treating stroke patients with 85 percent or higher compliance to core standard levels of care as outlined by the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association for 24 consecutive months. In addition, those hospitals have demonstrated 75 percent compliance to seven out of ten stroke quality measures during the 12-month period. 

“Urgency and expertise matter when a stroke occurs, because a person’s ability to recover depends on it,” said Gayle Belardo, stroke center coordinator at Redlands Community Hospital.  “This recognition demonstrates Redlands Community Hospital’s commitment to delivering advanced life-saving stroke treatments to patients quickly and safely.  We continue to strive for excellence and this acknowledgment from the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association’s further validates our team’s hard work.”

To qualify for the Target: Stroke Honor Roll, 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 stroke. If given 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. 

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.

“We are pleased to recognize Redlands Community Hospital for their commitment to stroke care,” said Lee H. Schwamm, M.D., national chairperson of the Quality Oversight Committee and Executive Vice Chair of Neurology, Director of Acute Stroke Services, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston. “Research has shown that hospitals adhering to clinical measures through the Get With The Guidelines quality improvement initiative can often see fewer readmissions and lower mortality rates.”

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.

To learn more about Redlands Community Hospital and its stroke center, call 909-335-5500 or visit: www.RedlandsHospital.org.