When a person has a stroke, every minute that passes without treatment increases the likelihood of significant loss of cognitive abilities, according to Dr. Sandra Ruby, medical director of Carroll Hospital Center's stroke program.
That's what makes the hospital's new designation as a primary stroke center so important.
"We've been taking care of stroke patients for years, but what the designation will provide for us at this point is it will allow EMS to bring patients with stroke symptoms to us directly," Ruby said. "EMS are mandated to take patients they recognize as having stroke symptoms to the nearest designated stroke center."
What that meant previously, Ruby said, is that when an ambulance picked up a stroke patient in Carroll County, they would be taken out of county to the nearest primary stroke center, be that Sinai or Northwest hospitals near Baltimore or Frederick Memorial Hospital. Given the importance of beginning treatment as soon as possible, Ruby said it's no small improvement for a Westminster stroke victim to be seen in Westminster rather than spending an hour or more traveling out of county.
Hospitals are certified as designated stroke centers by the Maryland Institute for Emergency Medical Services Systems, or MIEMSS, which both licenses ambulance services and designates trauma and specialty centers, according to its website.
To receive the designation as a stroke center, Carroll Hospital Center had to prove to MIEMSS that it had both the strict protocol in place to determine whether a patient is a candidate for medication-based stroke treatment as well as the staff to carry out that protocol, Ruby said.
There are two basic types of strokes: hemorrhagic, in which a person has internal bleeding in the brain, and ischemic, the more common type of stroke in which a blood clot has essentially plugged an artery in the brain. The result in either type is a portion of the brain being deprived of oxygen and eventually dying, unless blood circulation can be restored, but she said determining the type of stroke is only possible in a hospital setting.
Although the hospital announced the new designation on Tuesday, Ruby said the designation was official as of March 16 and that stroke patients have already begun being routed directly to Carroll. She does not yet have statistics available on the number of new stroke patients or how many stroke patients the hospital had been seeing before the designation, but she said she thinks there will be a significant increase over the next two months.
Stroke is the fifth-leading cause of death according to the American Heart and Stroke associations, and, according to spokesman Dr. Jeffrey Quartner, it's important that people learn to recognize the signs that someone is having a stroke.
"The classic sign is one side of your body goes numb and you lose chewing and swallowing," he said. "Other things can occur such as vision problems, facial droops, and that is really dependent on where that blockage is in the neurological circulation."
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Carroll Hospital certified as a primary stroke center