Milford Regional Medical Center Lauded for Response/Treatment for Stroke Patients

Milford Regional Medical Center was awarded the 2022 American Heart Association/American Stroke Association’s “Get With The Guidelines-Stroke” Gold Plus Award, marking the ninth consecutive year MRMC has received a Gold/Gold Plus award.

This year’s award is based on 2021 data and comes after the medical center’s multidisciplinary Stroke Committee—co-led by Neurologist Eliezer Sternberg, MD, and Emergency Medicine Physician Karen DeFazio, MD, FACEP—implemented several new strategies to improve stroke care at MRMC; such as launching the Code Stroke paging protocol.

According to the American Stroke Association, stroke is the fifth leading 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, and nearly 795,000 people suffer a new or recurrent stroke each year. Early stroke detection and treatment are key to improving survival, minimizing disability and speeding up recovery times.

The “Get With The Guidelines-Stroke” program was developed to assist healthcare professionals to provide the most up-to-date, research-based guidelines for treating stroke patients.

“This award highlights the collective efforts not only of our Stroke Committee, but of our wonderful colleagues in the Emergency Department, nursing, hospital medicine, critical care, and neurology,” said Dr. Sternberg. “Excellence in stroke management arises from the collaboration of all these departments, coming together with the common goal of delivering the best neurological care to our patients.”

MRMC’s Stroke Committee meets monthly to review quality metrics, evaluate our performance and develop process improvements where identified.

This past fall, the Stroke Committee worked extensively towards the implementation of the new Code Stroke paging protocol to expedite stroke care upon patients’ arrival to the Emergency Department and upon recognition of acute stroke symptoms with inpatients.

Every year the “Get With The Guidelines – Stroke” Gold Plus award recognizes those institutions that have demonstrated commitment to providing quality care for stroke patients. In addition to following treatment guidelines, institutions also provide education to patients to help them manage their health and rehabilitation once at home.

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Milford Regional Medical Center is a full-service, community and regional teaching hospital located in Milford, Mass. and serves patients from more than 20 towns in Central Massachusetts. The 149-bed medical center is a nonprofit, acute-care facility, where more than 300 primary care and specialty physicians are committed to providing exceptional healthcare services to our community with dignity, compassion and respect.