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Registered Countries

RES-Q currently has participating stroke centres in 93 member countries from throughout Europe, Africa, and Central and South East Asia. Membership is free, and is open to all hospitals or clinics that treat stroke patients from anywhere in the world. If you are interested in contributing to improving stroke care, we encourage you to enroll your centre by clicking here, or by contacting us directly by email by clicking here.

AF Afghanistan

AL Albania

DZ Algeria

AR Argentina

AM Armenia

AZ Azerbaijan

AU Australia

BH Bahrain

BD Bangladesh

BY Belarus

BE Belgium

BT Bhutan

BO Bolivia

BA Bosnia and Herzegovina

BR Brazil

BG Bulgaria

CM Cameroon

KY Cayman Islands

CL Chile

CN China

CO Colombia

CR Costa Rica

HR Croatia

CZ Czech Republic

CD Democratic Republic of the Congo

DO Dominican Republic

EC Ecuador

EG Egypt

EE Estonia

ET Ethiopia

FR France

GE Georgia

DE Germany

GH Ghana

GR Greece

GT Guatemala

HN Honduras

HU Hungary

IN India

ID Indonesia

IR Iran

IQ Iraq

IT Italy

JM Jamaica

JP Japan

JO Jordan

KZ Kazakhstan

KE Kenya

XK Kosovo

KW Kuwait

KG Kyrgyzstan

LV Latvia

LT Lithuania

MY Malaysia

MV Maldives

MT Malta

MX Mexico

MD Moldova

MM Myanmar

NA Namibia

NP Nepal

NL Netherlands

NG Nigeria

MK North Macedonia

PK Pakistan

PS Palestinian Territories

PA Panama

PY Paraguay

PE Peru

PH Philippines

PL Poland

PT Portugal

RO Romania

RU Russia

ST Sao Tome and Principe

SA Saudi Arabia

RS Serbia

SL Sierra Leone

SK Slovakia

ZA South Africa

KR South Korea

ES Spain

TZ Tanzania

TH Thailand

TN Tunisia

TR Turkey

UA Ukraine

AE United Arab Emirates

GB United Kingdom

US United States of America

UY Uruguay

UZ Uzbekistan

VN Vietnam

YE Yemen

Member Centres

Select a country below.

Effective January 2024, this website no longer supports the ESO/WSO Angels Awards Programme or the ESO, WSO and AHA/ASA quality monitoring or stroke centre certification programmes.

To know more please visit our partners' announcements (Angels Initiative, WSO, ESO).

What is RES-Q?

1. RES-Q is a Registry of Stroke Care Quality. Developed as an ESO East initiative, RES-Q was initially targeted at primarily at Central and Eastern Europe. However, RES-Q is happy to welcome users from across the world. 
2. RES-Q is an initiative of the ESO East Project (European Stroke Organisation- Enhancing and Accelerating Stroke Treatment) to help registered sites and countries improve their stroke care system.

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• What is RES-Q?
• The challenge
• Who will RES-Q help?
• How can RES-Q help?
• What information does RES-Q collect?

What is res-q?

The primary goal of RES-Q is to improve the quality of stroke care in central and eastern Europe by providing data that can be translated into healthcare policies and guidelines on both a national and European level. As a European Stroke Organisation (ESO) driven initiative, RES-Q is a pan-European, collaborative effort on the part stroke treatment centres, clinicians, and researchers to rapidly improve the level of stroke care throughout all participating countries.

The major challenge of stroke management is not finding new and better treatments, but improving the implementation of those treatments that already exist. Because of these gaps, more research into implementation is needed to improve outcomes for more stroke patients across Europe. Implementing these improvements does not necessarily require additional resources, but it does require better utilization of existing ones. RES-Q is designed to act as a tool for:

• 1) Monitoring the stroke care pathway
• 2) Recognizing the crucial challenges that each hospital and country faces
• 3) Highlighting areas of high need and informing the development of plans to address those needs
• 4) Monitoring the implementation of those changes and the subsequent improvements in stoke care

The performance measures that allow for standardized comparison of stroke care quality were published in Stroke 2015 (Bo Norrving et al). These performance measures include areas covering: coordination of care (stroke unit–based care), diagnosis (brain imaging, vascular imaging, cardiac arrhythmia detection, and therapy assessment), preservation of neural tissue (thrombolytic therapy and door-to-needle time), prevention of complications (dysphagia screening), initiation of secondary prevention (antiplatelet, anticoagulation, lipid lowering, blood pressure lowering, carotid surgery, time from vascular imaging to carotid surgery, and smoking cessation), survival (90-day post-stroke mortality), and functional outcomes (90-day modified Rankin Scale).

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The challenge

Healthcare policy should be driven by the best scientific evidence available. In stroke a large amount of evidence already exists, based primarily on randomized clinical trials or large international registries. After decades of research, stroke can be treated as effectively as other acute conditions such as myocardial infarction. However, less than 50% of stroke cases are admitted to stroke units, while less than 5% are treated with recanalization therapies, and only 10% receive anticoagulation therapy (if this is indicated). The lack of implementation is most likely due to the following factors:

• 1) Advances in the treatment of stroke are relatively recent (e.g. as compared to myocardial infarction)
• 2) Stroke has received less attention than other health hazards of modern society (i.e. heart disease and cancer)
• 3) Stroke is not a separate specialization, but exists within the field of neurology

This project aims to provide physicians, managers, professional societies, insurance companies, Health Ministries, the European Commission, and other policy makers with a tool that will inform them about the unmet needs in the management of stroke care and the implementation of evidence based practices. It will identify country specific targets and set the baseline for future decisions, plans, and actions to improve stroke care quality.

In this project, the goal is to develop a new registry (and integrate data from existing ones in select countries) to monitor the most important quality (performance) measures for stroke care. The collected data should provide a snapshot of the level of quality of care and prioritize the targets for interventions to improve stroke care quality. Usually, providing feedback on stroke care performance establishes motivation for many hospitals and physicians to improve stroke care quality. It is anticipated that data will come from different databases, from many hospitals and countries, and that it will provide important information to support and guide public health policies for one of the most devastating diseases - stroke. The final goal is to improve stroke care quality and decrease disparities in stroke care between different countries.

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Who will res-q help?

Approximately 17 million strokes occur annually in the world and stroke is the second leading cause of death globally after coronary heart disease. The true burden of stroke, however, also includes chronic disability. Stroke patients often require extended hospital stays followed by rehabilitation, on-going support from the community, and nursing-home care. Thus, stroke is not only a serious health issue for society, but a significant economic burden as well. Stroke is a major cause of neurological disability, not only in the elderly, but also in younger age groups: in 2010, 31% of the reported strokes were in children and adults <65 years. It is estimated that the burden of stroke is higher in Eastern Europe (and developing countries) as compared to western European countries. The major reasons for this are: a different risk factor profile (higher prevalence of risk factors in the east) and disparities in stroke care (low quality of stroke care in the east). These disparities must be addressed.

Stroke can be effectively treated: there have been huge advances in acute stroke treatment. Intravenous thrombolysis has been implemented into clinical practice in many countries during the first decade of the 21-century. Recently, in several clinical trials published in 2015, mechanical thrombectomy showed a huge clinical benefit in reversing neurological deficit, even in very sick patients. Moreover, other procedures, such as admission to the stroke unit, early prevention, decompressive hemicraniectomy, dysphagia screening and other measures, significantly improve outcome after stroke. Despite a large number of studies in stroke management, the implementation into clinical practice is slow, e.g. thrombolytic rate is around 5% of the ischemic strokes, while in many Eastern European countries it is negligible. It is worse in the case of mechanical thrombectomy, which is costly. However even low cost procedures, such as dysphagia screening, are not well implemented into clinical practice. In conclusion, stroke is a treatable and preventable disease as effective treatments do exist, unfortunately, the implementation has been suboptimal.

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How can res-q help?

RES-Q endeavors to bring together stroke care quality data from clinical sites across Europe.  RES-Q will provide multiple contribution methods, from paper documents to fully web deployed e-forms, to allow for data collection from a broad range of facilities.  The goal is to use these heterogeneous data sources to generate a clear picture of the gaps and areas of improvement in stroke care quality in a variety of geographically, economically, and demographically diverse areas regardless of the technological capacity of the local stroke center.  To promote sharing and reusability of data, the RES-Q project will also integrate existing quality registries from multiple participating centers.  This will allow centers to collect their own local data while also contributing to building a larger picture of stroke care through contribution to RES-Q.  This will also allow for retrospective analysis from participating centers that will contribute stroke care data from prior to the initiation of RES-Q. 

This collaborative, global effort will result in the establishment of an extensive network of contributing sites that will serve to inform current public health strategy and to guide the development of stroke care strategy in the future. The purpose of RES-Q is to develop a cohesive picture of the current effectiveness and consistency of stroke treatment amongst member states. ESO is already active in developing and advocating for public health policy changes to improve stroke care. RES-Q will provide a platform to both collect and share data specifically about how these policies are affecting actual clinical practice. Bringing data from all participating sites, including sites with existing registries, will drastically improve ESO’s ability to make accurate and timely recommendations to public health officials for new guidelines that should be implemented to improve overall patient health.

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What information does res-q collect?

The variables we are currently collecting can be seen in the image below. Click on the image to make it bigger. Click anywhere inside it to close.

For a more detailed listing in pdf form, please click here.

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