Pre-hospital Alerts Allow Stroke Patients to Skip Emergency Room

According to a recent report published in the journal Neurosurgery, pre-hospital stroke alerts given by emergency medical services (EMS) personnel can shorten the time stroke patients wait for treatment with clot-busting drugs, allowing them to bypass the emergency room and undergo immediate computed tomography (CT) scanning. In this new approach, specialists gave EMS personnel special training in identifying stroke patients, allowing them to later send a pre-notification to the hospital letting the team know that a potential stroke patient would be arriving. The EMS personnel would then bring the patient directly to the CT suite (skipping the emergency room altogether), who would be met by the neurological emergency team. A quick assessment and CT scan of the brain could confirm a stroke which would allow for clot-busting drugs to be administered immediately, given the appropriate time frame. During the study, on average, CT scans were performed about 12 minutes after the patient arrived at the hospital — compared to 35 minutes without the pre-alert system. To read more about this study, click here.