Dear Editors:
Thank you for your continuing focus on health care issues in our community! A short time after attending the May 4th meeting announced by Arthur Z. Schwartz in WestView News, to discuss the crisis in our area’s health care, I went to Weill Cornell Medical Center on York Avenue to hear a talk, which included the topic of advanced stroke care.
Reminders of the 60-minute ideal “golden hour” of time for medical intervention after the onset of symptoms seemed an illusory goal given our fragmented, failing system. However, Weill Cornell, Columbia University Medical Center, and the New York Presbyterian Hospitals have implemented a mobile stroke unit—“a customized emergency vehicle that brings a highly-specialized team of experts, diagnostic equipment, and stroke-specific drugs right to a patient’s doorstep.” (Consult the March 23, 2017 article in Early Intervention, “With a State-of-the-Art Mobile Unit and Pioneering Research, Weill Cornell Medicine is at the Vanguard of Treating Stroke Patients—for Whom ‘Time is Brain,’” by Heather Salerno.)
This enables neurologists to see stroke patients immediately, rather than waiting until they reach the emergency room. For Dr. Matthew E. Fink, Chairman of the Neurology Department at Cornell Weill, mobile units are “representing a shift in how providers deliver overall emergency care.”
How can such a life-saving vehicle be incorporated into our already nomadic system?
—Rosanne Levitt
