World Stroke Academy - 2020 activities overview

06 Jan 2021 Education

Find out more of what the dedicated team of the World Stroke Academy achieved in the last challenging 6 months!

Dear friends and colleagues,

This past year we were faced with the outbreak of Covid-19 pandemic that has caused significant social, political and economic consequences worldwide. This global and health crisis has been a huge challenge for everyone, affecting and changing our way of living and working. Still, all of us caring in for stroke patients adapted to maintain the highest level of quality of care by initiating various strategies.

The team of the World Stroke Academy (WSA), the Education platform for the World Stroke Organization (WSO) has worked with great enthusiasm and provided educational materials for healthcare professionals in different formats, mainly webinars and social media activities. We have been in tight regular communication by e-mails and teleconferences; through teamwork and collaboration, we facilitated access to practical and high-quality material in the area of stroke.

As mentioned, our goals are based on three principles: i) teamwork and collaboration (with SSO, Educational and Research Committees at the WSO), ii) facilitating access to practical and peer-reviewed high-quality material relevant to our daily stroke practice, and iii) increasing the value of the WSA.

What have we done in the last 6 months?

We created the WSA Leadership group

The WSA Leadership group includes senior stroke neurologists* and meets monthly to discuss the direction and priorities of the WSA. Some of the groups’ tasks are I) peer-reviewing of educational content and II) ranking of proposed webinar and e-learning topics.

*Deidre Anne De Silva (Singapore), Valeria Caso (Italy), Luciano Sposato (Canada), Andrew Demchuk (Canada), Jose Merino (USA), Gabriel R. de Freitas (Brazil)

We delivered 25 webinars in 2020

WSA team organized 25 webinars that have proven to be a highly popular format with the stroke community and have increased brand awareness of WSA/WSO. Collaborations have been established with other stroke organizations, such as BI Angels, the Canadian Stroke Consortium, the Asia Pacific Stroke Organisation (APSO), the African Stroke Organisation (ASO) and the American Stroke Association (ASA).

We created the WSA social media team

The WSA social media team has significantly increased our followers (+10% each month) and reach on Twitter in 2020. This had a direct impact on user acquisition to the WSA platform: our social media is now the top channel, followed by direct access (newsletters) and referral via the WSO website. In collaboration with Sarah Belson (Stroke Connector) and the Education Committee we organized the highly successful WSO tweetchat (#strokechatWSO; >5 Million impressions), focusing on the COVID pandemic and stroke care.

Active participation in the Joint ESO-WSO Conference

We have highlighted the speakers (#whotofollow) and selected sessions (#WSAEditorsChoice). We have organised live tweeting by selected stroke professionals to boost the WSA/WSO social media presence during the conference and increase user traffic to the WSA platform.

Future plans

ESO/WSO Joint Conference

We are planning to build educational modules based on selected sessions and talks at the joint ESO-WSO conference and release them after the conference on the WSA portal. Authors have been already contacted and have agreed to share their lectures.

E-learning modules

We have reviewed and selected modules with the highest priority and all authors have accepted the invitation to contribute to the WSA. The date of delivery was agreed individually with speakers, with consideration of the current difficult times for clinicians at the front-line of the pandemic. The content will be reviewed and ranked in the collaboration with the Educational Committee.

Case studies

In alignment to the commissioned e-learning topics, we have also commissioned case studies. The content will be reviewed and ranked in the collaboration with the Educational Committee.

Upcoming webinars (the organisation of the webinars is done in tight collaboration between the WSA Executive Manager and the WSO Committees): Timing of starting anticoagulation is ischemic stroke with AF (January 2021); Management for stroke with both atherosclerosis and AF mechanisms (January 2021); TIA/minor stroke (spring 2021); How to detect brain stem stroke?; Decision making under uncertainty in Acute Stroke Care: Lessons learned from behavioral economics; Simulation training- COVID and beyond; Simple swallowing tests for low or resource settings; Stroke and the Heart Brain Axis and many more…

Call for webinar topics

To streamline the webinar commissioning process, there will be a biannual call for webinar topics (deadline: 30th January and 30th June). WSO committees and WSO members will be invited to submit topics, which will then be reviewed and ranked anonymously by the WSA Leadership group.

New WSA website

We are launching a new WSA website, with new, user-friendly and exciting content through Optima. We are looking forward to complete see a fruitful, flexible, and integrated new platform.

Future directions

Further strengthen the collaboration with WSO Committees (Education, Research and Guidelines Committee)
To work in closer collaboration with Sarah Belson and the Stroke Support Organizations;
To continue the mutual cooperation with IJS leadership (via direct communication with Prof. High Markus as the Editor-in-Chief and Carmen Lahiff-Jenkins Managing Editor) by linking IJS publications with WSA content, highlight recent articles (paper of the month), Twitter Journal Clubs, etc.;
To implement a certification system for the attendance of WSA/WSO webinars;
To facilitate the author’s recognition: via a data repository site that generates a DOI for each upload to the WSA, authors can get recognition via Google Scholar;
To implement special projects to improve stroke care and education in areas with restricted access (e.g. Stroke Care in Africa);
Integration of the Future Stroke Leader Program (Leadership: Prof. Werner Hacke, Dr. Valeria Caso and Dr. Christopher Cheng) with different WSA activities.

As we enter the New Year, there is a lot to look forward to in the WSA. Before looking ahead, however, we would like to offer a word of thanks to our colleagues, followers, readers, contributors and our leadership group for their support of the WSA, its mission and vision: to improve the education and quality of care for stroke patients.

The WSA team: Gustavo Saposnik (Canada), Editor –in– Chief; Anita Arsovska (North Macedonia), Associate Commissioning Editor; Alina Schwarz (Austria), Executive Manager; Rodrigo Guerrero (Chile), Social Media Leader and Florencia Casagrande (Argentina), Communications Specialist wish you and all WSO members a HAPPY, HEALTHY, and PROSPEROUS NEW 2021!

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Our partners and sponsors

Achieving our vision of a life free from stroke is a task that WSO cannot achieve alone. We are committed to building our partnerships at the global, regional and national level to scale up and deliver improvements in prevention, treatment and support to reduce the burden of stroke.