When fire department paramedics found 50-year-old Gerald Booker unable to drive, his left side weak and his speech slurred because of an apparent stroke, they told the yard laborer he was going for a ride.
Instead of stopping at hospitals closer to his home in the Pleasantville neighborhood of this sprawling city, the paramedics took Booker to Memorial Hermann Hospital, one of more than 660 hospitals across the USA that specialize in treating strokes.
The idea behind the specialty center trend — whether in treating strokes, trauma or heart attacks — is the belief that staffs in such facilities move faster and perform better than those in other hospitals, making up for any extra minutes a patient spends on the road.
A 2007 study in the journal Neurology examined more than 26,000 stroke patients admitted to 606 Canadian hospitals and found there were more adverse outcomes such as death for those treated in “low-volume” facilities — those dealing with fewer than 50 strokes a year — than in high-volume centers that treat 100 or more strokes annually.
Source: USA Today, 11 August 2008
Chapter: Heart Disease :: 21 August 2008
