Dear friends and colleagues in the Angels Community,
In the last few of weeks, the COVID-19 pandemic is changing all our daily lives. Of course, we are absolutely aware that you and your colleagues in the hospitals have the biggest challenges, workload and risk by far.
Please don’t forget, we as Angels will continue to support you whatever it takes. Most of the planned face-to-face meetings and conferences have been canceled for the next two months, but our Angels Consultants will continue to communicate with you by appropriate channels to help you in the current situation, to deal with the challenges, to find ways to treat stroke patients in a new environment and, if possible, to continue the work that you started before. Please do not hesitate also to contact us, if you think this can help you and your patients.
We are well aware that there are huge differences in the different countries, regions and hospitals due to the level of outbreak and the health care infrastructure. Some hospitals in heavily affected regions are transformed to “virus-clinics”, stroke units are closed or transferred to normal stations. A lot of you and colleagues are overloaded with work and others - as we - must work more or less remotely.
Please try not to stop sharing your experience, the situation that we are facing is totally unprecedented, so we can learn a lot from each other. To facilitate this, we created an Angels Initiative private Facebook group. In other words, only people registered on the Angels website will be accepted in the page. We want to make this platform available for you to support each other, encourage each other and connect information that could save lives. We hope you will join us there!
World Stroke Organization has published a webpage that provides updates and perspectives from strokologists around the world during this time of pandemic, which we highly recommend visiting. Similarly, you can read the firsthand experiences of two doctors from Italy as shared by European Stroke Organization on their blog.
We have added a list of potentially useful resources which we will continue updating below, so please do check back from time to time. If you find any of them to be relevant or useful for your situation, we kindly request that you share it with your colleagues and other stroke centers in your countries.
Let us hope that the situation will improve as soon as possible, as much as possible infected people will be cured and there will be enough doctors and nurses as you to care for the stroke patients.
All the best,
The Angels Initiative Team