Florida Hospital Tampa Receives Highest Award For Quality Stroke Care From The American Heart Association

Florida Hospital Tampa recently received the American Heart Association/American Stroke Associations Get With The Guidelines-Stroke Gold Plus Achievement Award with Target: Stroke^SM Honor Roll Elite Plus. This award recognizes the Hospitals ongoing commitment to providing the most appropriate stroke treatment according to nationally recognized, research-based guidelines based on the latest scientific evidence. This is the highest level of recognition the Association awards to hospitals for quality stroke care.

The Get With The Guidelines-Stroke achievement is given to hospitals that regularly meet or exceed quality measures and indicators recommended for stroke patients by the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association. To qualify for the Target: Stroke Honor Roll Elite Plus award, hospitals must meet quality measures developed to reduce the time between the patients 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 and/or damage.

A stroke patient loses 1.9 million neurons each minute stroke treatment is delayed, said James Lefler, MD, Co-Director of the Florida Hospital Tampa Stroke Program. Our program was developed to quickly and accurately diagnose a stroke and provide the highest level of treatment available. This recognition from the American Heart Association further reinforces our teams hard work.

Florida Hospital Tampa has also met specific scientific guidelines as a Primary Stroke Center by the Joint Commission in collaboration with the American Stroke Association as well as designation by the Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA) as a Comprehensive Stroke Center.

The American Heart Association and American Stroke Association recognize Florida Hospital Tampa for its commitment to stroke care, said Paul Heidenreich, MD, MS, national chairman of the Get With The Guidelines Steering Committee and Professor of Medicine at Stanford University. Research has shown there are benefits to patients who are treated at hospitals that have adopted the Get With The Guidelines program.

According to the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association, stroke is the number five 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.