ALTOONA – The Altoona Regional Hospital has received the Get With The Guidelines(r)-Stroke Gold Plus Quality Achievement Award from the American Heart Association.
The award recognizes Altoona Regional’s commitment and success in implementing a higher standard of care by ensuring that stroke patients receive treatment according to nationally accepted guidelines.
Get With The Guidelines(r)-Stroke helps Altoona Regional’s staff develop and implement acute and secondary prevention guideline processes to improve the quality of care for stroke patients, and may reduce disability and save lives.
“Altoona Regional is dedicated to making our care for stroke patients among the best in the country. The Get With The Guidelines(r)-Stroke program helps us accomplish this goal,” said Janet Ashurst, Neuroscience/Stroke clinical coordinator. “This recognition demonstrates that we are on the right track, and we’re very proud of our team.”
Following Get With The Guidelines-Stroke treatment guidelines, patients are started on aggressive risk-reduction therapies including the use of medications such as tPA, antithrombotics and anticoagulation therapy, along with cholesterol reducing drugs and smoking cessation counseling. These are all aimed at reducing death and disability and improving the lives of stroke patients. Hospitals must adhere to these measures at a set level for a designated period to be eligible for the achievement awards.
Altoona Regional is a non-profit community health care provider with a 380-bed acute-care hospital anchoring a system that includes a modern outpatient center, surgery center and more than 20 affiliated health care companies. Altoona Regional offers centers of excellence in cancer, heart, stroke, vascular and emergency care, as well as orthopedics, neurosciences, behavioral health, sleep medicine, wound care and much more. Altoona Regional’s Trauma Center serves more than 20 counties in central Pennsylvania. The mission of Altoona Regional Health System is for exceptional people to provide exceptional health care.
Get With The Guidelines(r) is the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association’s hospital-based quality improvement program that empowers healthcare teams to save lives and reduce healthcare costs by helping hospitals follow evidence-based guidelines and recommendations.
For more information, visit http://www.heart.org/quality.
