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14
HEALTHY LIFE
HEART & STROKE
May 1-2, 2013
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By SAUNDRA SORENSON
Pamplin Media Group
T
he fourth leading cause of death in
the nation is the subject of proposed
legislation in Oregon.
With a stroke, as the billboards
say: time lost is brain lost.
“A stroke is basically a brain attack, and so,
basically, with every second that goes by, brain
is lost,” said Stephanie Tama-Sweet, Oregon’s
director of government relations for the Amer-
ican Heart Association. “As soon as you have a
stroke, you want to first recognize that there’s
an emergency and get to a treatment facility.
The ideal time is under 60 minutes.”
But a 2009 report that looked at emergency
response systems and quality care across the
country found serious shortcomings in stroke
care statewide. According to Tama-Sweet, Ore-
gon received a D grade.
“Part of the reason was a lack of funding and
information about care for strokes and also
heart disease,” Tama-Sweet said.
The public should know, for example, that
there are two different kinds of stroke: hemor-
rhagic, which is a bleeding stroke, and isch-
emic, which involves clotting.
“Basically you want to be seen in 60 min-
utes,” Tama-Sweet said, “and if you’re having a
clot stroke, you want to get a clot-busting drug
within those first 60 minutes.”
The two sides to improving stroke care are
public awareness and medical services, she
added. Awork group that formed in response
to the 2009 study outlined several steps the
state could take to improve stroke care. Tama-
Sweet was part of a committee that presented
this information to the state Senate inmid-April.
Legislating improvement
An amendment to Senate Bill 375 seeks to
improve Oregon’s stroke care overall by estab-
lishing both an oversight committee and a
statewide database about stroke care. The
amendment was unanimously voted through
the state Senate on April 16, and is making its
way through the state’s House of Representa-
tives.
The bill authorizes the Oregon Health Au-
thority to appoint a Stroke Care Committee
with at least 10 members. The panel would in-
clude at least one neurologist specializing in
stroke care, administrators from certified
Comprehensive Stroke centers, representa-
tives from the nursing and emergency re-
sponse fields, and a stroke care advocate.
The bill also calls for extensive input from
health care professionals practicing in rural
areas.
The amendment to SB 375 also asks the Ore-
gon Health Authority to create a state data-
base to collect information on stroke care at
hospitals throughout Oregon, in part to ad-
dress the disparity in quality of care from hos-
pital to hospital. Such measures would allow
the state to identify models of exemplary care
within the state, then determine best practices
that could be applied more broadly.
Although all hospitals would be encouraged
to submit stroke care data, any hospital with a
Comprehensive Stroke Care or Primary Stroke
Center certification would be required to do so.
But such data would be for statistical purposes
only and would be considered “nondiscover-
able and inadmissible” in court, according to
the proposed amendment.
Tama-Sweet emphasized that such data col-
lection was not about publicly singling out low-
er-performing care facilities and that such in-
formation about hospitals would not be shared.
“The community would be able to use that
data for making improvements to make sure
patients are getting the best care that they
can,” she said.
It is an important step to improving public
awareness and tightening up response time to
a medical emergency that not only often is fa-
tal, Tama-Sweet said, but also is the No. 1
cause of preventable disability.
■
Bill would create oversight panel, statewide database concerning stroke care
Oregon gets serious about strokes
“Basically you want to be seen in 60 minutes, and if you’re having a clot
stroke, you want to get a clot-busting drug within those first 60 minutes.”
— Stephanie Tama-Sweet,
Oregon’s director of government relations for the American Heart Association