Tampa, FL (May 31, 2017) – Tampa General Hospital received the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association’s Get With The Guidelines®-Stroke Gold Plus Achievement Award with Target: StrokeSM Honor Roll Elite Plus.
The award recognizes TGH’s commitment to providing the most appropriate stroke treatment using nationally recognized, research-based guidelines.
Hospitals that earn the award must achieve at least 85 percent adherence to all Get With The Guidelines-Stroke achievement indicators for two or more years. They must also achieve 75 percent or higher compliance with five of eight of those measures.
To qualify for the Target: Stroke Honor Roll Elite Plus recognition, hospitals must meet quality measures to reduce the time between a patient’s arrival 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. An ischemic stroke is caused when a blood vessel to the brain is blocked by a clot. If given intravenously in the first three hours after the start of stroke symptoms, tPA can 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.
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.
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