The EMS
Angels
Awards
The new award scheme from the Angels Initiative, designed specifically for Emergency Medical Services.
Join Angels Initiative
www.angels-initiative.com
It's not our time that's precious, it's theirs.
Why WE NEED EMS Angels Awards
Monitoring pre-hospital stroke care and sharing data between EMSs and hospitals is vital to improving and standardising care. However, quality monitoring isn’t yet common practice in all countries.
The Stroke Action plan for in Europe 2018-2030 highlights the importance of monitoring as a mechanism for improvement.
actionplan.eso-stroke.org
Quality monitoring allows clinicians to observe, standardise, troubleshoot and modify their stroke patient pathway to ensure services are being adequately delivered.
The EMS Angels Awards – part of the wider Angels Initiative – creates a structure that offers valuable global comparisons of key aspects of pre-hospital care.
A Tried and Tested Approach
The EMS Angels Awards share a similar process to their sister scheme the ESO Angels Awards for hospitals.
“We can motivate stroke EMS teams for improvement based on guidelines in specific areas to qualify for the EMS Angels Awards.
We think this incentive will be very positive to improve the management of stroke patients.”
Doctor Nicolas Riera, Head of EMS Stroke Commission in Madrid.
Meeting the Criteria
The awards criteria are based on international guidelines and the experience of our international EMS Steering Committee. To qualify for an award, EMS services must:
- Have a formal Stroke Protocol in place
- Offer an established annual Stroke Educational/refresher program
- Make use of specific stroke scales in the management of their stroke patients
- Submit data for at least 30 consecutive stroke patients managed by their service during the previous quarter
The Process in Detail
Once the EMS Service has met the criteria they can begin to follow a simple and fair process to join the awards program...
If any of the inclusion criteria is not met by the EMS Services, they can contact their local Angels to assist to put in place.
www.angels-initiative.com
Their first task is to register with the RES-Q Registry. This helps ensure that all participants are benchmarked against the same criteria.
The EMS Angels Awards spreadsheet is provided to local EMS companies or services. This will be used to standardise the data and to ensure that patient level data is not shared outside of the organisation.
The EMS Service creates a standardised report that extracts the relevant data from their existing systems. At the end of each quarter they can then export the bulk data from their systems using this report and simply paste the data into the EMS Awards Spreadsheet.
In order to qualify for an award, the data should cover at least 30 consecutive stroke patients in any one quarter.
The spreadsheet then automatically calculates the Regional EMS Service’s award status according to the ESO Angels Award Criteria. It also provides some important visualisations which can be used by EMS services to easily identify areas for improvement.
To ensure data security and patient anonymity, only the cumulative data from the EMS Service - as calculated by the EMS Awards Spreadsheet - is captured on the RES-Q platform. RES-Q will use this cumulative data to start the awards approval process and to create dashboards for national and international benchmarking.
“EMS Angels Awards are a very simple concept; how to push pre-hospital stroke care higher.
Not only to push, but especially acknowledge those who are performing well.
And say ‘Thank You’ ”.
Petr Jaššo, Chief of education of EMS in Ostrava in Czech Republic.
ENSURING GLOBAL CONSISTENCY
A robust approval process is triggered at the end of each quarter by the Angels awards portal on the RES-Q Platform.
Around 45 days after the quarter closes, data for that quarter becomes available to the National Coordinators (NCs).
If any of the data seems inaccurate the dashboard will allow NCs to veto specific awards. They have 14 days to submit exceptions to Angels and RES-Q.
On completion of the approval process the Angels are notified via email. The certificates can then be printed and awarded to winners at ceremonies in their local EMS Services.
Winners also receive PR materials allowing them to publicise their achievement.
Diamond Prize
Those EMSs that achieve a Diamond Award are invited to accept it in person at the annual EUSEM Conference.
The EMS Angels Awards
Join Angels Initiative
www.angels-initiative.com
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