Tri-Cities to be served by stroke ambulance
Tri-Cities residents and visitors will soon benefit from faster treatment of suspected strokes, as a mobile stroke unit is poised to start serving the area.
You may see the large white ambulance from Northwestern Medicine's Central DuPage Hospital as early as next week, according to Mehr Mohajer-Esfahani, the program's manager.
The service area of Tri-City Ambulance, a municipal cooperative that provides emergency medical services, has been added: St. Charles, Geneva, Batavia and the unincorporated parts of Geneva and Batavia townships.
The special ambulance is outfitted with equipment and medications to diagnose and treat strokes. A four-person team works on it: a critical-care nurse, a paramedic, a paramedic driver and a CT technician.
The mobile stroke unit staff can take images with a CT scanner to send to stroke specialist physicians at Central DuPage. Those physicians will also examine the patient via a camera. They will determine what kind of stroke the patient has had.
If it is an ischemic stroke, caused by a blood clot, the crew can administer medication to dissolve the clot. If it is a hemorrhagic stroke, they can administer medications to reverse or slow the bleeding.
Since the unit started operating in January 2017, it has served more than 400 patients.
Mohajer-Esfahani said the unit can shave about 30 minutes off the time it normally takes to begin treating a stroke. It may not seem like much, but he told the Batavia City Council on Monday that each minute saved prevents the loss of about 1.9 million neurons. Each minute saved also translates to one or two fewer days of disability, he said.
When an emergency dispatcher or TCA crew suspects a caller has had a stroke, the unit can be dispatched to where the person is. In the future, to save time, the ambulances may meet up at the site of the former Charlestowne Mall in St. Charles or the Fox Valley Ice Arena in Geneva.
The unit is available from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. daily. Mohajer-Esfahani said research showed that the highest volume of stroke reports came during those hours. But if more calls come in at other times, the service may be expanded, he said.