Heart & Stroke

Comments added by the Charity:

Comment for Charity Intelligence Profile – December 5, 2016

Heart&Stroke is a national charity with an ambitious vision: “Healthy lives free of heart disease and stroke. Together we will make it happen.” We need Canadians to join with us, as they have over the last 60 years, to help us in our mission to prevent disease, save lives and promote recovery.

Our national strategic plan, launched in 2013, set us on the path to achieving even greater tangible improvement in the health of Canadians. The plan identifies two specific impact goals, and everything we do ladders up to achieving these goals by 2020:

• Reduce Canadians’ rate of death from heart disease and stroke by 25 per cent
• Significantly improve the health of Canadians by decreasing their risk factors for heart disease and stroke by 10 per cent

Since Heart&Stroke was established in 1952, we have invested more than $1.45 billion in vital heart and stroke research, making us the largest contributor in Canada after the federal government. In that time, the death rate from heart disease and stroke has declined by more than 75 per cent. Our research grants have led to breakthroughs such as:

• A hormone that revolutionized how we can control blood pressure, the leading risk factor for stroke;
• The first heart transplant surgery in Canada;
• Identification of the risk factors accounting for 90 per cent of all strokes and first heart attacks; and
• A procedure that cuts stroke deaths by 50 per cent and significantly reduces disability in survivors by quickly pulling the clots out of the brain (ESCAPE trial 2015).

Below are some other recent examples that illustrate the impact we’re having:

• In 2015, we created – along with the Childhood Obesity Foundation – a coalition of influential national, provincial and regional groups with an interest in promoting nutrition and health to advocate to restrict all commercial marketing of foods and beverages to Canadian children, and were successful in making this an issue during the federal election. Heart&Stroke was the first Canadian organization to call on Canadians to limit the amount of added sugar they consume each day. Too much sugar is linked to heart disease, stroke, diabetes and high blood cholesterol.
• In 2015, we released a thought-provoking position statement on saturated fats, calling on Canadian society to think about saturated fats and heart disease in a new way.
• In 2015, our advocacy efforts led to Nova Scotia and Alberta being the first jurisdictions to introduce a ban on menthol in cigarettes, the most commonly used flavour among youth.
• Since 2004, we have empowered more than 1 million Canadians to assess their risk of heart disease and stroke, to target high blood pressure (the number one risk factor for stroke and a major risk factor for heart disease), and to make other healthy changes through the use of our free eTools.
• In 2015, Heart&Stroke continued to provide a range of patient information and resources. We introduced Your Stroke Journey, a free comprehensive guide that helps stroke survivors and their families understand the effects of stroke and manage their recovery process.
• In 2015, Heart&Stroke unveiled our Community of Survivors, a network of nearly 700 Canadians who have experienced heart disease, heart failure or stroke and are interested in improving their recovery. This group engaged in a variety of work, including being spokespeople during stroke month and testing the use of online technology for helping manage recovery.
• In 2015, Heart&Stroke committed $1.5 million over five years (matched by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research) to the Canadian Resuscitation Outcomes Consortium (CanROC), an ambitious, multi-provincial initiative aimed at improving survival rates from cardiac arrest by ensuring that all Canadians, regardless of their location, receive excellent care, from bystander response and early defibrillation through to advanced pre-hospital care.
• In 2015, Heart&Stroke funded research in regenerative medicine that could be a game changer for patients with heart failure. A heart transplant is the only solution for advanced heart failure but research that is close to being translated into therapy could help the heart to repair itself after a heart attack.

Heart&Stroke is committed to providing the highest level of financial responsibility and transparency around our operations. We believe in monitoring and measuring our performance on an ongoing basis; continuously reviewing which programs and activities deliver higher returns and identifying ways to increase revenue so we can have even more impact against our mission. We continue, as always, to be strongly committed to improving the efficiency of our organization. We are confident that the strategic investments we made in becoming one organization will ensure the longer term success and efficiency of the HSC – leading to meaningful improvements in the health of Canadians.