Award demonstrates Garfield Medical Center’s commitment to quality care for stroke patients
Garfield Medical Center Receives American Heart Association’s Get With The Guidelines-Stroke Gold Plus Quality Achievement Award
<0> For Garfield Medical CenterGary Hopkins, 805-705-2586 </0>
Garfield Medical Center has received the Get With The Guidelines–Stroke Gold Plus Quality Achievement Award from the American Heart Association. The award recognizes Garfield Medical Center’s commitment and success in implementing a higher standard of care by ensuring that stroke patients receive treatment according to nationally accepted guidelines.
This marks the third year in a row that Garfield Medical Center has been recognized with a quality achievement award.
Get With The Guidelines–Stroke helps Garfield Medical Center’s staff develop and implement acute and secondary prevention guideline processes to improve patient care and outcomes. The program provides hospitals with a web-based patient management tool, best practice discharge protocols and standing orders, along with a robust registry and real-time benchmarking capabilities to track performance.
The quick and efficient use of guideline procedures can improve the quality of care for stroke patients and may reduce disability and save lives.
“Recent studies show that patients treated in hospitals participating in the American Heart Association’s Get With The Guidelines-Stroke program receive a higher quality of care and may experience better outcomes,” said Lee H. Schwamm, M.D., chair of the Get With The Guidelines National Steering Committee and director of the TeleStroke and Acute Stroke Services at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Mass. “Garfield Medical Center’s team is to be commended for their commitment to improving the care of their patients.”
Following Get With The Guidelines-Stroke treatment guidelines, patients are started on aggressive risk-reduction therapies including the use of medications such as tPA, antithrombotics and anticoagulation therapy, along with cholesterol reducing drugs and smoking cessation counseling. These are all aimed at reducing death and disability and improving the lives of stroke patients. Hospitals must adhere to these measures at a set level for a designated period of time to be eligible for the achievement awards.
“Garfield Medical Center is dedicated to making our care for stroke patients among the best in the country. The American Heart Association’s Get With The Guidelines–Stroke program helps us to accomplish this goal,” said David Batista, Garfield Medical Center’s Chief Executive Officer. “The program recognizes care that is consistent with the latest scientific guidelines from the American Heart Association and American Stroke Association. This recognition demonstrates that we are on the right track and we’re very proud of our team.”
According to the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association, stroke is one of the leading causes of death and serious, long-term disability in the United States. On average, someone suffers a stroke every 40 seconds; someone dies of a stroke every four minutes; and 795,000 people suffer a new or recurrent stroke each year.
Other awards received by Garfield Medical Center in recent years include:
Garfield Medical Center has a long history of excellent patient care. Started over 80 years ago as a one-room hospital, today Garfield is a 210-bed, full-service, acute-care facility that has steadily grown over time in size, scope and success. The hospital operates an Approved Stroke Center (ASC) and a S-T Elevated Myocardioinfarction (STEMI) Receiving Center, both approved by Los Angeles County Emergency Medical Services, out of the ER. With over 500 well-trained doctors and 1,300 employees on staff, Garfield caters to the diverse population of Monterey Park and its environs. Not only does the Garfield facility offer state-of-the-art care, its physicians and staff embrace the multi-ethnic, multilingual patient population by speaking a variety of languages and offering translation services. With approximately 13,000 inpatient treatments and about 40,000 outpatient visits annually, Garfield Medical Center continuously meets community needs for high-quality, reliable health care and prides itself on making its culturally diverse patients feel at ease.
Get With The Guidelines is the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association’s hospital-based quality improvement program that empowers healthcare teams to save lives and reduce healthcare costs by helping hospitals follow evidence-based guidelines and recommendations. For more information, visit