PAWTUCKET – Memorial Hospital of Rhode Island and Walgreens have launched a joint stroke education and community-outreach program that aims to help the public identify stroke risks, recognize the signs of stroke, and be more aware of important health issues.
About 700,000 U.S. residents suffer a stroke each year, according to the American Stroke Association, and about 3,000 strokes per year occur in Rhode Island, 600 of them fatal.
For this campaign, Memorial’s Stroke Team worked with Walgreens to create pocket-size personal medical profiles for customers to keep track of medications and health issues. Special prescription notes designed to help customers recognize the signs of stroke are being distributed at Walgreens stores in East Providence and northern Rhode Island.
In addition, posters in English, Spanish and Portuguese reinforce the need to call 911 in the event of a stroke. In the future, the campaign may include stationing Stroke Team members at local Walgreens stores to answer questions from the public.
“Stroke awareness is critical to obtaining timely treatment,” said Dr. Mason C. Gasper, neurology director of the stroke program at Memorial and assistant professor of clinical neurosciences at The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University. Gasper noted that there is a three-hour window after a stroke when a clot-busting drug can reverse the effects.
“One of our goals is to educate the community on wellness,” said Joseph Prignano, Walgreens district manager. “Since Memorial’s Stroke Team includes experts in risk prevention, acute treatment, rehabilitation and even home care, it offers a wide scope of information that we can make available to our customers.”
The Memorial Stroke Program provides early risk evaluation and prevention, emergency time-sensitive assessment and treatment, a dedicated Stroke Unit, acute in-hospital rehabilitation and outpatient rehab and home care.
Memorial Hospital of Rhode Island – a 294-bed community hospital with its main campus in Pawtucket and primary-care and ambulatory-care affiliates in Barrington, Central Falls and Plainville – is a research and teaching facility of Brown University’s Warren Alpert Medical School, which has uses the MHRI Center for Primary Care as the chief site for its academic program in primary care. For more information about Memorial Hospital, go to www.mhri.org. For more information about Walgreens, go to www.walgreens.com.
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