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| Photo from U.S. Department of Health and Human Services |
The report found that 54% of stroke survivors, or more than 3,000 people each year, could benefit from a policy of ‘early supported discharge’.
This approach to rehabilitation allows patients to return to their own homes more quickly and intensive treatment is given in the home for a number of weeks. According to today’s report, this approach would require a substantial increase in the resourcing of community therapists (physiotherapists, occupational therapists, and speech and language therapists), community nurses and other community care above current levels in Ireland.
However, savings from the reduced cost of acute bed days could fund this increase in resourcing.On one hand, hospitals are not healthy places. Lots of sick people and germs are present. You might or might not sleep well in a hospital. Family members are strained.
Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you.Lately, I've had to work on getting rid of my own anxiety.
In a scientific statement, the AHA notes that stroke is more common among African-Americans, Hispanics, American Indians, and Alaskan Natives than among whites.
The AHA calls for raising awareness of stroke factors and the need for urgent treatment, increasing access to insurance coverage in minority populations, and doing more research on the roots of racial and ethnic disparities in stroke care. ...
Stroke is more likely if you have risk factors including high blood pressure, diabetes, high cholesterol, smoking, obesity, and a history of peripheral artery disease (PAD), carotid artery disease, or certain types of heart disease.
Several of those risk factors are more common in minority groups than among whites.
The updated standards include:
• Specifically tracking the percentage of ischemic stroke patients identified as eligible for tissue plasminogen activator (tPA) and appropriately treated within a 60-minute door-to-needle time. According to the guidelines, tPA is the only clot-busting drug approved for treating ischemic strokes and is effective only when given within a few hours after the onset of a stroke.
• Tracking the time from hospitalization to treatment to repair blood vessels for patients with a ruptured aneurysm.
• Performing 90-day follow-up of ischemic stroke patients to assess their outcomes after acute interventions, including treatment with tPA.
Nearly two-thirds of Medicare patients who are discharged after having a stroke will die or be readmitted to the hospital within a year, according to a new study in the journal Stroke.
The findings are “striking,” says study author Gregg C. Fonarow, MD, the Eliot Corday Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine and Science and the director of the Ahmanson-UCLA Cardiomyopathy Center in Los Angeles.
Fonarow and colleagues analyzed the death and hospital readmission rates for more than 91,000 Medicare beneficiaries treated for ischemic stroke at 625 hospitals from April 2003 and December 2006. The most common type of stroke, ischemic strokes occur when blood flow to the brain is blocked.
Older people are less likely to receive high-quality stroke care compared with younger patients, researchers warn. And this is despite evidence suggesting that care is equally effective across age groups, they note. The new studies point to ageism in stroke care — the first is published online April 16 in BMJ and the second in the March issue of the Postgraduate Medical Journal.
"We found low rates of secondary drug prevention," report the BMJ study authors, led by Rosalind Raine, PhD, professor of health-services research from University College London, in the United Kingdom.
Women are 30 percent less likely than men to receive a critical clot-busting drug than can limit brain damage after a stroke, according to a Michigan State University study.
The study findings were presented Feb. 19 in San Diego at the International Stroke Conference, organized by the American Heart Association and American Stroke Association.
Tissue plasminogen activator, or tPA, first approved as a treatment in the mid-1990s, is a potent blood thinner used to dissolve artery-clogging clots, which cause most strokes. As part of its study, a team of MSU researchers reviewed all stroke studies published between 1995 and March 2008 that presented data on tPA treatment rates. Eighteen studies provided data on more than 2.3 million patients.
Nurses from competing hospitals are joining together to improve the care that stroke patients receive at hospitals throughout New Jersey.As in many circumstances, nurses wind up coordinating stroke centers, the article says, and special training helps to improve that coordination. Thus the effort in New Jersey. Efforts to upgrade stroke care coordination should either be ongoing or about to begin everywhere.
Tracking a killer is part of a plan to improve stroke treatment in Tennessee, the Chattanooga Times Free Press recently reported.A newly created Tennessee stroke database will help improve treatment for one of the state’s leading killers, according to researchers and health advocates.
The stroke registry, created by legislation signed into law in June, will include stroke treatment and outcome data from as many Tennessee hospitals as possible, with an eye to identifying and improving weaknesses in stroke care, said Dr. Patti Vanhook, chairwoman of the stroke registry committee for the state’s stroke task force and assistant professor in the college of nursing at East Tennessee State University.
