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Community Healthcare System Grants Life Saving Partner Award to EMS Team

October 21, 2021October 21, 2021 Goddard

When a stroke happens, seconds matter. Community Healthcare System is lauding an EMS team who recognized that a Dyer woman needed immediate, complex neuroendovascular care and transported her to Community Hospital, a Comprehensive Stroke Center.

Paramedic Janiece Cox and EMT Michelle Devaney, employees of Superior Ambulance Service, are the first recipients of the Life Saving Partner Award from Community Healthcare System. The award, created to recognize outstanding efforts of EMS personnel for critical lifesaving efforts on behalf of stroke patients, was presented on behalf of the team at Community Hospital’s Comprehensive Stroke Center in Munster.

“Recognition like this means more than we could ever express,” said Cox, who also is a 911 contract supervisor for Superior. Devaney added, “I appreciate it, but we were just doing our job.”

Based out of the ambulance company’s Dyer station, Cox and Devaney recently responded to a 911 call for a “sick person.” They arrived to find a 61-year-old woman complaining of neck pain that began when she was washing her hair. Among her symptoms, she felt a pounding headache and momentarily experienced blurry vision.

“At first, we were just going to take her to the closest facility,” Cox said. “But then the more I thought about it, the more I spoke to her, something didn’t seem right. She was washing her hair, so what if she had a fracture? What if it was meningitis? It all points to the brain.”

In the ambulance, the crew measured the woman’s blood pressure, and the reading was so high, they thought their equipment had failed. The systolic—or top—number was more than 300, the highest reading on the blood pressure monitor. A normal systolic number is 120.

“I’ve never ever, in nine-plus years, seen the monitor with a blood pressure that high,” Devaney said. “It was so high, it wouldn’t read. We had no original starting blood pressure.”

EMS medical control agreed that, based on the woman’s symptoms and need for urgent and specialized neurological care, Cox and Devaney should transport the woman to Community Hospital. There, they knew the advanced medical team would be available through the Comprehensive Stroke Center.

Community Healthcare System’s administrative director of Neuroscience, Cerebrovascular Services and Structural Heart, Jill Conner, MSN, APRN, said EMS plays a critical role in the chain of survival in stroke patients because they make the initial assessment and decision to transport to the closest most appropriate level of care.

“You only have a limited amount of time,” she said. “EMS is so crucial to stroke treatment. They were able to recognize the possibility of a large vessel blockage (in the brain).”

Bringing the patient to Community Hospital was the right call, Conner explained. If the crew would have taken the patient to a Primary Stroke Center instead, she would have been assessed and likely transferred to Community Hospital, a Comprehensive Stroke Center. If they would have taken her to a Chicago hospital, she would have lost precious time.

“By bringing the patient straight here, it take 45 minutes to an hour off of that time,” she said. “Saving that amount of time undoubtedly saved brain tissue damage.”

Community Hospital is Northwest Indiana’s only accredited Comprehensive Stroke Center. The Munster hospital’s stroke teams are prepared to act within moments of a patient’s arrival for the most advanced neuro-interventional services. This higher level of care and management also allows Community Hospital to serve as the destination center for complex stroke patients, including those arriving at Northern Indiana’s Primary Stroke Centers.

When the patient arrived at Community Hospital, scans showed she had suffered a subarachnoid hemorrhage or bleeding in the space that surrounds the brain. Community Care Network neuroendovascular surgeon Sherman Chen, MD, controlled a bleeding brain aneurysm by inserting a device to close off the aneurysm and change the blood flow to reduce further bleeding.

Neurosurgeon Wayel Kaakaji, MD, also with Community Care Network, inserted a drain into the patient’s skull to relieve pressure on the brain. The patient was taken to the hospital’s specialized hybrid operating suite numerous times for treatment of vasospasm, which occurs when a brain blood vessel narrows and blocks blood flow.

After spending a month recovering from her surgeries at Community Hospital, the woman was discharged to a local nursing rehabilitation facility and was able to eventually return home.

“With strokes, the mantra is: time is brain,” Conner said. 

Under Indiana law, EMS uses established rapid triage and transfer protocols to take patients to the closest hospital best equipped to treat the appropriate level of stroke symptoms. The legislation improves intervention times and outcomes.

A Comprehensive Stroke Center, as defined by the Brain Attack Coalition, is a facility with the necessary personnel, technology, training and programs to diagnose and treat complex stroke patients requiring an elevated level of medical and surgical care, specialized tests or interventional therapies.

In addition, Community Hospital has demonstrated the ability to deliver advanced, high-quality care for patients by providing the following:

·        24/7 access to minimally invasive catheter procedures to treat stroke

·        A dedicated Neuroscience Intensive Care unit

·        Onsite neurosurgical availability 24/7 with the ability to perform complex neuroendovascular procedures

·        Treatment for large ischemic, hemorrhagic and other complex strokes

“If she would have gone to any other hospital, the outcome could have been devastating,” Cox said. “Literally every moment in transport counted in this patient’s life.” 

At the award presentation, Sonia Hedge, BSN, RN, neuroscience transfer coordinator for Community Healthcare System, told the EMS duo they are heroic.

“You dealt with everything that you could have and tried every intervention you could, and your thought process has this woman alive today,” Hedge said during the award presentation. “All of you are very much, in my opinion, her heroes, and I’m sure she would feel the same way. She’s very blessed to have had you on that call.”

Photo – Pictured, left to right. Back row: Rachel Renner, stroke data RN at Community Hospital; Robert Bradley, Portage station manager for Superior; Tristan DeFord, 911 contract manager for Superior; Ben Kresal, Merrillville station manager for Superior; Alicia Begeske, Highland station manager for Superior; Greg Ingraham, mobile logistics and safety manager for Superior; Jeff Wilken, Indiana operations manager for Superior; and Jonathan Meschede, LaPorte station manager for Superior. Front row: Alexa Szatkowski, research data specialist at Community Hospital; Diana Gutierrez, neuroscience patient flow coordinator at Community Hospital; Meridith Dorge, neuroscience patient flow coordinator at Community Hospital; Sonia Hedge, neuroscience transfer coordinator at Community Hospital; Janiece Cox, paramedic and 911 contract supervisor at Superior; and Michelle Devaney, EMT at Superior.