Lakeview Hospital Earns Quality Achievement Award

Lakeview Hospital earned the “Get With the Guidelines” Stroke Gold Plus Quality Achievement Award from the American Heart Association. This award recognizes the hospital’s commitment and success in implementing a higher standard of care by ensuring that stroke patients receive treatment according to nationally accepted guidelines.

“Recent studies show that patients treated in hospitals participating in the American Heart Association’s Get With the Guidelines-Stroke program receive a higher quality of care and may experience better outcomes,” said Lee H. Schwamm, M.D., chair of the Get With the Guidelines National Steering Committee and director of the TeleStroke and Acute Stroke Services at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Mass. “The Lakeview Hospital team is to be commended for their commitment to improving the care of their patients.”

In addition to delivering advanced stroke care – fast – hospitals start patients on aggressive risk-reduction therapies including the use of medications such as tPA, antithrombotics and anticoagulation therapy, along with cholesterol reducing drugs and smoking cessation counseling when following Get With the Guidelines-Stroke treatment guidelines. These guidelines are aimed at reducing death and disability and improving the lives of stroke patients. Hospitals must adhere to these measures at a set level for a designated period of time to be eligible for the achievement awards.

“We are thrilled to be recognized as a Stroke Gold Plus facility,” said Rand Kerr, Lakeview Hospital, CEO. “We are dedicated to making our care for stroke patients among the best in the country. This recognition demonstrates our commitment to that goal and we’re very proud of our team.”

According to the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association, stroke is one of the leading causes of death and serious, long-term disability in the United States. On average, someone suffers a stroke every 40 seconds; someone dies of a stroke every four minutes; and 795,000 people suffer a new or recurrent stroke each year.