Every morning when I wake up I think about the grandma that last night may have told her last bedtime story. I also think about the child that may never learn how to make a paper airplane and the birth of a baby that may be missed because today someone, somewhere‘s life will be changed forever when they suffer a stroke. I worry because I know that as I speak these very lives depend on the actions taken by others. I hope someone is there to identify the symptoms, I pray they have the clarity of mind to call the ambulance and not go to some random hospital themselves. My mood lifts a bit as I start thinking about all the amazing people that work in these Stroke Ready hospitals. I think about the doctors and nurses (the true Angels) that tend to our grandparents as if they were their own.
The Angels Initiative's mission is to gather all the power, resources, experience and knowledge we can muster together and invest all of it in helping these nurses, doctors, ambulance crews and everyone else involved in stroke care to become the best that they can possibly get so that they can make sure that the strokes that are suffered today does not steal the life away from the ones that suffer them.
In November 2016, the Angels Initiative took hands with Spanish nurses at the SEN and SEDENE congress. We were honoured to start our partnership with SEDENE as we instinctively knew we may be able to support them somehow but more importantly we sensed that what we could learn from them we could use to impact nurses all over the world.
Today with more than 60 countries participating actively in the Angels Initiative, stretching from India to Iceland and everywhere in between we know that SEDENE is a true bright spot for nursing care in stroke. For this reason, it is especially important to congratulate the society on an incredible milestone: its 25th anniversary. We would like to encourage you to grow further into the future not only in Spain but to use the Angels Initiative as a vehicle to empower nurses all over the world.
We firmly believe that nurses are a basic pillar of stroke care and we have been working with SEDENE to develop tools and materials to improve stroke patient outcomes by focusing on the hyper-acute and post-acute phases of stroke.
As of now, we have participated in regional and national Jornadas de Enfermería Neurológica and local trainings and we have counted on SEDENE to review a complete Stroke Nurse Certification course that is available online in our website.
We supported SEDENE in the development of a fellowship for stroke nurses to provide a hands-on intensive training in established stroke centers for the development of new stroke champions. We have achieved half of this fellowship's first edition trajectory, so there are 15 nurses that will go back to their hospitals and implement improvements in their stroke unit or neurology department thanks to the experience they gained with their rotation. Moreover, there will be 15 more nurses that will go through the same experience, improving the overall stroke care in the country. Let's see what exciting opportunities there are to offer for the second edition of this fellowship.
We are also proud to have SEDENE in the QASC Europe study steering committee, helping us push forward a nurse-led intervention that has proven to save lives by managing fever, sugar and swallowing of stroke patients in the first 72hours post stroke.
As for next steps, we are working with SEDENE to develop new materials for the main priority items for patient stroke care and share them with the world with a seal of quality that only SEDENE can give.
The Angels Initiative - Proudly supporting our heroes,