The Heart and Stroke Foundation is celebrating the 20th anniversary of a set of national guidelines meant to help Canadians treat, recover from and prevent serious medical episodes. The milestone is being marked alongside the personal stories of people who have lived through a stroke and the long road back.
The guidelines date back to 2006, when Heart and Stroke and the Canadian Stroke Network introduced national recommendations aimed at standardizing how stroke is diagnosed, treated and managed. Known as the Canadian Stroke Best Practice Recommendations, they compile the relevant research into usable summaries that help clinicians and health systems understand how to best provide care.
Over the past two decades, the recommendations have expanded well beyond their original focus. They have grown from a treatment-centred document into a full system covering prevention, emergency treatment, rehabilitation and recovery, with stroke now thought of as a system of care that runs from the community and the arrival of paramedics all the way through to rehab and recovery.
The scale of the problem helps explain the effort. More than 108,000 strokes occur in Canada each year, about one every five minutes, and nearly one million Canadians are living with the effects of a stroke today.
One of them is Vito Mergulow of Montreal, who knows how quickly life can change. His stroke affected all of his motor skills, leaving him unable to speak, walking with a limp and unable to move his right arm, and he had to learn all of it over again from scratch.
For his family, the timing made it even harder. Because it happened during COVID, they could not go to the hospital to see him, and his daughter recalls trying to talk to him over FaceTime, unable to understand what he was saying as his mouth looked slightly crooked. Seeing her father like that, she said, affected her a great deal and was very hard to take.
Experts say time remains critical in stroke care, which is why Heart and Stroke continues to promote its FAST campaign and urges people to act immediately. The message is to go to the hospital even if it turns out to be a false alarm, because for someone who feels dizzy or disoriented, getting help right away is what helps save lives.