American Heart Association Award recognizes Palm Beach Gardens Medical Center’s commitment to quality stroke care
October 27 2020 – Palm Beach Gardens Medical Center receives the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association’s Get With The Guidelines- Stroke Gold Plus with Target: Stroke Honor Roll Elite Quality Achievement Award. The award recognizes the hospital’s commitment to ensuring stroke/brain attack patients receive the most appropriate treatment according to nationally recognized, research-based guidelines based on the latest scientific evidence.
Palm Beach Gardens Medical Center meets specific quality achievement measures for the diagnosis and treatment of stroke/brain attack patients at a set level for a designated period. These measures include evaluation of the proper use of medications and other stroke treatments aligned with the most up-to-date, evidence-based guidelines with the goal of speeding recovery and reducing death and disability for stroke patients. In order to safely transition to discharge; patients receive brain attack education with an emphasis on recognizing stroke symptoms, the importance of calling 911 and managing controllable risk factors to prevent future brain attacks. Patients are encouraged to set goals based on their individual risk factors so they can actively manage their health on the journey toward recovery.
“Palm Beach Gardens Medical Center is dedicated to improving the quality of care for our stroke patients by implementing the American Heart Association’s Get With The Guidelines-Stroke initiative,” said Teresa Urquhart, chief executive officer at Palm Beach Gardens Medical Center. “The tools and resources provided help us track and measure our success in meeting evidenced-based clinical guidelines developed to improve patient outcomes.”
Palm Beach Gardens Medical Center additionally received the Association’s Target: StrokeSM Honor Roll Elite Gold Plus award. To qualify for this recognition, hospitals must meet quality measures developed to reduce the time between the patient’s arrival at the hospital and treatment with the clot-buster tissue plasminogen activator, or tPA, the only drug approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to treat ischemic stroke.
According to the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association, stroke/brain attack is the No. 5 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.
It is important to recognize brain attack symptoms and to immediately call to 911 so patients are emergently transported to the hospital for examination and treatment.
About Palm Beach Gardens Medical Center:
Palm Beach Gardens Medical Center is a 199-bed acute care hospital serving the medical and healthcare needs of Palm Beach County and the Treasure Coast for over 50 years. The hospital was the first in Palm Beach County and the Treasure Coast to perform open-heart surgery and has since remained one of the area’s leading heart hospitals, having performed nearly 19,000 open-heart surgeries and more than 100,000 cardiac catheterizations to date.
The Heart & Vascular Institute at Palm Beach Gardens Medical Center offers comprehensive cardiac care and advanced minimally-invasive procedures including Transcatheter Aortic Valve Replacement (TAVR), MitraClip, and Watchman. The hospital is the first in Palm Beach, Broward and Martin County to adopt the minimally invasive convergent approach to treat patients with atrial fibrillation. The hospital’s outpatient cardiac rehabilitation program is designed for people recovering from a heart attack, coronary bypass or valve surgery, and angioplasty or stent procedures.
Palm Beach Gardens Medical Center offers advanced orthopedic care to our community. Some of the services offered include: total joint replacements for hip, knee and shoulder, sports medicine, arthroscopy, podiatry, fracture management and inpatient/outpatient rehabilitation. In 2019, Palm Beach Gardens Medical Center was the only hospital in the State of Florida to utilize the NAVIO robotic-assisted surgical system to perform total and partial knee replacements.
Additional services include an Advanced Certified Primary Stroke Center, diagnostic imaging, general and robotic surgery, an Epilepsy Program and 24-hour emergency care. Palm Beach Gardens Medical Center’s Emergency Department offers all private rooms and is equipped with technology to help increase patient comfort, reduce wait times and provide up-to-the-minute patient status, as well as immediate access to film-based radiological images, interpretations and related data. The hospital’s Epilepsy Program is the first of its kind in Palm Beach County to have a dedicated Epilepsy Monitoring Unit that is equipped with long-term video monitoring, a specialized form of an EEG for patients who suffer from seizures. The hospital acquired the da Vinci Xi Robotic Surgical System which can be used across a spectrum of minimally-invasive procedures such as cardiovascular, colorectal, general surgery, gynecology, urology and more.
The hospital was the recipient of the American Heart Association’s Get With The Guidelines – Stroke Gold Plus Quality Achievement Award with Target: Stroke Honor Roll Elite Plus from 2015 – 2020 and also was named a High Performance Hospital for Heart Failure in U.S. News and World Report’s 2020-2021 Best Hospitals. Palm Beach Gardens Medical Center was also named as the best heart center in Palm County from the Palm Beach Post 2020 Best of Palm Beach County Awards. For more information or for a complimentary physician referral, please call (833)-619-8831 or visit www.pbgmc.com.
