Norwalk Hospital honored for stroke treatment efforts

Norwalk Hospital, part of Nuvance Health, has earned the “Get With the Guidelines” Stroke Gold Plus Award for 2023. It was also inducted into this year’s Stroke Elite Honor Roll and the Type 2 Diabetes Honor Roll, all issued by the American Heart Association and American Stroke Association.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, every 40 seconds someone in the U.S. has a stroke, and every 3 minutes and 14 seconds someone dies of stroke. Each year, more than 795,000 people have a stroke, and roughly about 610,000 of these are first or new strokes. Stroke-related costs came to nearly $56.5 billion between 2018 and 2019 (the most recent years for measured data) and this total includes the cost of health care services, medicines to treat stroke, and missed days of work.

The Honor Roll Elite indicates that the hospital ensured that at least 85% of patients with strokes were identified and able to begin treatment within 60 minutes of entering the hospital, while the Type 2 Diabetes Honor Roll indicates consistent quality treatment for stroke victims with the complicating health issue.

All the hospitals recognized by the Get With the Guidelines program displayed the same high level of care and attention to detail, regardless of the “medal” they earned. The “Gold” represents that Norwalk Hospital has consistently provided that service with skill and consistency for more than 24 months, with 12 months earning Silver and 90 days taking Bronze.

During that timeframe, the hospital must provide the latest in effective stroke care including antithrombotic medication that shrinks the blood clots in the brain that cause strokes and have the ability to perform mechanical thrombectomies which remove the clots through surgical means. The hospital must also consistently provide treatments within the timeframe where they are most effective and demonstrate effective smoking cessation programs for stroke patients with a history of smoking.

Time is key because a few minutes’ delay can greatly impact the outcome for a patient. Norwalk Hospital was one of the first public hospitals in the region to offer some of the advanced therapies that have now become standard practice.

“Stroke is one of the most time sensitive disease processes,” said Dr. Joshua Marcus, a neurosurgeon that performs mechanical thrombectomies at Norwalk Hospital. “Patients need to get to the hospital that can deliver care as quickly as possible.”

Dr. Daryl Story, the neurology section chief and stroke director at Norwalk Hospital, was modest about the achievement.

“It’s really making sure that we’re doing all of the really essential fundamentals in a very consistent way, and we’ve gotten very good at that,” Story said. “It’s really not too difficult after being a stroke center for 20 years to really have that drilled into the culture of everyone that comes in contact with the stroke patient. Everyone knows the playbook.”

Michele Lecardo, a registered nurse and Norwalk Hospital’s stroke coordinator, said she appreciated the recognition but was motivated by the work itself.

“This is why I love doing my Job,” Lecardo said of the effort that the award recognized. “I’ve been a nurse for 31 years and neuro is something I never thought that I’d be doing, but it’s about the process. I love to build and sustain processes because that’s truly what gives us the best care for our patients.”

“Sure, you can build a program,” Lecardo added, “but if there’s not sustainability and you don’t have buy in from the organization it falls apart. The stroke program truly is accountable to everybody in the hospital. It starts with EMS, and maybe even earlier than that, with the community who have to be educated on the signs and symptoms of a stroke to call 911. Stroke is more time sensitive than any other 911 call because we only have certain timeframes when we can intervene.”

According to Lecardo, the advanced care which Norwalk and other hospitals have adopted have redefined what it means to be “lucky.”

“For some of those patients having large strokes, 15 years ago they wouldn’t have walked out of the hospital,” she said, noting that patients today now consistently not only survive once fatal strokes, but are able to take advantage of therapies that let them rejoin society with a minimal loss of function. Lucky used to mean ‘survive.’ Now lucky is “okay, let’s see if we can get you out of here on your own two feet.”