For the 11th year in a row, Englewood Health Emergency Medical Services (EMS) has secured national praise for its rapid, high-quality response to life-threatening heart attacks and strokes.
The American Heart Association (AHA) awarded the team its prestigious Mission: Lifeline® Gold EMS Achievement Award, a distinction celebrating sustained clinical excellence in the field. Alongside this top-tier honor, Englewood Health EMS was also named to both the Target: Stroke Honor Roll and the Target: Heart Attack Honor Roll.
The dual honor roll placements highlight the team’s exceptional performance in quickly identifying severe symptoms, starting treatment early, alerting the receiving hospital ahead of arrival, and drastically reducing the time it takes to get patients into definitive care.
When treating strokes or severe heart attacks, every second saved preserves vital brain cells and heart muscle. Achieving this level of care requires strict coordination between first responders and hospital staff.
“This kind of consistency doesn’t happen by chance—it’s built into how our teams think and act every day,” said Barbara Schreibman, MD, medical director of EMS and associate chief of emergency medicine at Englewood Hospital. “From the moment our EMS clinicians arrive on scene, they are making critical decisions that directly impact outcomes. These recognitions reflect a system that is aligned, prepared, and focused on delivering the right care at the right time.”
To satisfy the AHA’s rigorous Mission: Lifeline benchmarks year after year, an EMS agency must prove that its field coordination is practically seamless. Crews must demonstrate elite accuracy under pressure, initiate specialized care protocols right on scene, and ensure patients are brought directly to the hospital best equipped to treat their specific emergency.
The repeating accolades underscore Englewood Health’s broader structural objective: closing the gap between the ambulance ride and the emergency room.
“These awards reflect the strength of our entire system—where speed, training, and precision come together to deliver the highest level of care,” Richard Sposa, director of EMS and emergency preparedness at Englewood Health said. “We’ve built a model where prehospital care is tightly connected to what happens inside the hospital, and that alignment is what drives these outcomes year after year.”
