If there was a leaderboard for Angels Awards, Pauls Stradins Clinical University Hospital in Riga, Latvia, would be right at the top, with 28 ESO Angels diamond awards and no end in sight.
They first put up their hand at the start of 2018 when they registered with Angels, and by the end of that year began a hot streak of diamond awards that would have been uninterrupted but for a missed data entry deadline in the summer of 2023.
Find something that works, and keep doing it, is how head of the stroke unit Dr Kristaps Jurjāns explains their extraordinary success.
The Angels Awards program is more than a tool for evaluating and rewarding performance. On the principle that “what gets measured gets improved”, the awards criteria align with actions proven to improve outcomes after stroke. They therefore serve as a checklist for stroke centers and stroke-ready hospitals, to help them identify and target opportunities for improvement.
The Angels Awards bring the key components of stroke care into focus and make data collection integral to care, thereby creating the necessary conditions for quality monitoring. But they have also proved to be useful for removing roadblocks to transformation.
In Salta, Argentina, for example, neurologist Dr Gabriela Orzuza gave a masterclass in how public recognition can drive change and benefit patients. When Dr Orzuza first joined San Bernardo Hospital, there was no stroke team, no stroke plan and no stroke treatment. There was also no vacancy for a vascular neurologist, so Dr Orzuza worked for free. before being given a temporary appointment as instructor of neurology residents. She was officially appointed nearly a decade later after her hospital won a WSO Angels gold award, the honour making it uncomfortable for the provincial authorities not to do so.
A platinum award the following quarter gave her the institutional heft needed to establish a stroke unit at her hospital. When six months later, her stroke unit achieved WSO certification, she used the momentum to expand the hospital’s stroke service to include thrombectomy.
Excellence is a habit
Like Dr Jurjāns, we subscribe to an Aristotelian concept of virtue which historian Will Durant summarised as follows: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence is not an act, but a habit.” Nine-thousand awards in 10 years have shown that excellence is cultivated through regular, disciplined actions, and greatness is trained through daily habits and small, consistent choices.
We are proud to share the stories of diamond hospitals and of hospitals that have overcome obstacles to win their first award. But we also know it’s the second and third and fourth award that really carry our mission forward.
Because consistency counts. And repetition defines character.
