August 4, 2005

Santa Clara County now the only ‘stroke-savvy’ county in the U.S.

By Kymberli W. Brady
Staff Writer

If you’re going to have a stroke, with any hope for a complete recovery, Santa Clara County is now the best place in the country to have one.

Ambulance drivers throughout Santa Clara County have been given the green light to stray from protocol and re-direct potential stroke victims to one of four Certified Stroke Centers in the Bay Area.

On Tuesday, Santa Clara County supervisors agreed to change outdated protocol that now allows ambulance drivers to re-route suspected stroke patients to one of four official stroke centers, the final piece of the treatment puzzle that is expected to greatly reduce the disability and mortality rate of a disease that afflicts 700,000 people in the U.S. each year, more than 170,000 of them fatally. Stroke is the number-one cause of disability and the number-three cause of death.

“We are now the first county in the nation to not only have four certified stroke centers, but to have all ambulances prepared to take people to those stroke centers,” says former Vice Mayor and newly appointed Chamber CEO Pat Dando.

Dando, who suffered a stroke in 2001, knows all too well how important immediate treatment is to the recovery process. Her awareness of Mayor Ron Gonzales’ pending stroke while giving the State of the City address in Jan. 2004, followed by quick action further cemented the need for targeted more measures within the public safety arena.

According to a May 5 article in the Wall Street Journal, stroke victims are often taken to the wrong hospital, due in large part to outdated ambulance rules that stress proximity over specialized care, coupled with most emergency-room doctor’s inability to properly diagnose a critical condition that gets more paralyzing—even deadlier by the minute.

New techniques now offer stroke victims a better chance at a full recovery, but only if medication administered within the first three hours works to dissolve blood clots in the brain that cause strokes. By getting a stoke patient to a neurologist at a certified stroke center, the odds of dying or becoming severely disabled could be greatly reduced.

Together with fellow survivors Charles Hoffman and Chuck Toeniskoetter, Dando helped form the Stroke Awareness Foundation [SAF] in an effort to educate, inform, and examine ways to be more proactive in treating the deadly disease.

The SAF has been working with the San Jose Fire Department and AMR Ambulance Services to explore ways to more readily detect and transport stroke victims to certified stroke centers, while providing training and educational materials to local emergency medical services personnel so that they can better recognize stroke symptoms.

Working with JCAHO [Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organization], the SAF sought and eventually garnered the cooperation of four Bay area hospitals, now certified as a Primary Stroke Centers that provide 24-hour availability of advanced technology and medical skills for stroke victims.

Ambulance drivers, who are certified to recognize the symptoms of a stroke, will now be able to change course and redirect patients to stroke centers at Good Samaritan, Stanford, Kaiser Santa Teresa, and Kaiser Santa Clara. Two more are expected to come on board in the near future.

“People need to be constantly aware of what strokes are and what they need to do,” says Dando. “It is going to be so much easier for people, now that our ambulance services have coordinated with the stroke centers.”