Alberta’s stroke centres winning race against time for treatment
Posted Mar 6, 2017 2:52 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
When minutes make all the difference, the quick work of Alberta healthcare teams help slash the time it takes to diagnose and treat stroke patients.
According to Alberta Health Services, the province’s 17 stroke treatment centres are among the fastest in the world. Last year, they averaged 32 minutes in between the point a patient arrives at the hospital, to when they’re treated with a clot-busting drug. In 2012, the average was about 70 minutes.
Dr. Michael Hill is a Calgary stroke neurologist and principal investigator in a program called Quality Improvement & Clinical Research, funded by Alberta Innovates. He said patients lose an average of 1.9 million neurons per minute, which means going to a nursing home or walking out of a hospital can depend on the quick work of healthcare staff.
“That’s a lot of neurons and thinking power that goes away if you don’t get treated quickly, so it’s a motivating factor for us,” he said. “The bottom line is 10 or 20 minutes can really make a difference.”
The figures measure treatment for ischemic stroke, the most common kind, and treating it with the clot-busting drug tPA. Dr. Hill credited frontline staff for reducing the “door-to-needle” times across the province, by structuring rapid stroke response across 17 Alberta hospitals.
“This is such a huge team effort,” he said. “It’s nurses, clerks answering the phone, dispatchers in the ambulance, paramedics — a huge number of people all coming together to make this kind of thing possible.”
At Foothills Medical Centre, the average treatment time last year was 26 minutes, cut from 2012’s average of 54 minutes.
