Eight minutes.
That’s how long it took the medical rescue service of the Moravian-Silesian region to reach the address where a colleague’s mother had suffered a severe stroke.
In Lisbon to collect an inaugural EMS Angels diamond award, prehospital stroke education pioneer Petr Jaššo remembered it exactly. His team spent 11 minutes on the scene and took just 14 minutes to reach the hospital where the stroke team had been prenotified. Thanks to this swift action, this very important patient was walking and talking within weeks, with the prospect of returning to her pre-stroke life.
In October 2021, nine of Europe’s top ambulance teams converged on Lisbon, Portugal, where the first EMS Angels Awards for excellence in prehospital stroke care was a highlight at the annual conference of the European Society for Emergency Medicine (EUSEM). Encouraged by the impact the Angels awards program was having on intra-hospital stroke care, it had been decided to extend the awards programme to emergency medical services, starting in Europe. Ultimately, the purpose of the awards was to ensure that the maximum number of stroke patients were correctly assessed, adequately supported, and rapidly distributed to an appropriate stroke centre, where prenotified stroke teams are ready to meet their treatment needs. By highlighting weaknesses that could be addressed with specific targeted actions, the EMS Awards would raise the standard of care.
By late 2025, nine had grown to 277 recipients of over 1,000 EMS awards, and paramedic Ferenc Molnár of the Hungarian National Ambulance Service (OMSZ) published his study of the impact of the EMS Angels Awards on prehospital stroke care in Hungary.
A different universe
Based on an analysis of over 80,000 cases, the study details OMSZ performance improvement in five key areas in the four years after it adopted the quality-improvement measures recommended by Angels, and expressed in EMS Angels Awards criteria.
Between January 2021 and December 2024, median on-scene time fell from approximately 21 minutes to 19, documentaton of medication history rose from 29 percent to 99 percent, and onset-time recording reached nearly 100 percent after being made mandatory in 2023. Hospital prenotification improved from 11 percent to 97 percent, and direct transport to stroke-ready hospitals from 59 percent to 99,8 percent.
In 2023, Hungary became the first (and so far only) country in the world to reach diamond status in the EMS Angels Awards, in every one of its regions, a feat it repeated in 2024 and 2025.
Inside an ambulance car there was a different universe, Ferenc said. “Every time I work in the ambulance car, I feel better because I am doing something for society, for someone. It’s good to be there. Every EMS worker feels the same way.”
