What to expect in Episode 13
Ep 13: Jan van der Merwe | A Decade of Angels
The Angels Initiative is 10 years old. In a special birthday edition of the Angels Stroke Heroes podcast, we talk to project lead and cofounder Jan van der Merwe about a decade of Angels, the organization he and Thomas Fischer brought to life in May 2016.
Ten years later, the Angels Initiative has reached every goal, and exceeded every target.
It is estimated that more than 50 million stroke patients will receive evidence-based care in Angels hospitals by 2030.
With over 300,000 registered users on the Angels website, it is the world’s largest stroke community, a truly global movement that spans multiple continents including Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Over 200,000 courses have been completed in our online learning platform, the Angels Academy. World-wide, more than 9,000 hospitals and 1,000 prehospital teams have met the standard for hospital and EMS awards.
The target of 1,500 hospitals by December 2019 was reached in 2018, and the number of registered Angels hospitals now exceeds 10,000. The Angels-supported schools-based awareness program, FAST Heroes, has reached more than one million children and two million grandparents. And the strategy to convert 1000 Angels Regions by December 2027 overshot its target earlier this year.
We asked Jan about the tragic event that became a trigger for an extraordinary intervention in stroke care, about the strategic model that underpins the organization, and about doing things for the right reasons.
In this episode:
• God’s plan & doing things for the right reasons
• The devastating moment that led to the launch of Angels
• A multi-platform behavior change strategy
• Insights about complexity and time
• The real meaning of awards
• A shocking experience that further shaped his understanding of the mission
• ‘They need not wait to see what others do’
• The next 10 years
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE BELOW
We are celebrating a decade of Angels and talking to project lead and cofounder Jan van der Merwe about 10 extraordinary years since the Angels Initiative was launched at ESOC 2016, with the goal to reach 1,500 hospitals within the next 3 years.
Since then, an estimated 24 million patients had been admitted to one of more than 10,000 Angels hospitals, where they received the best possible chance of surviving a stroke with their lives intact.
Ahead of the 10th birthday celebration, we asked Jan to take us back to Barcelona on Monday 9 May 2016, hours before ESO president Kennedy R. Lees would introduce the Angels Initiative in his opening address.
Did he have any inkling of how the next 10 years would unfold, how impactful this organization would turn out to be?