About nine years ago, Dr Ángel Corredor happened to visit a medium-sized city located on Colombia’s famous coffee-growing axis, and decided that this was where he wanted to live. A walkable city surrounded by snow-capped mountain peaks and rain forests, Armenia reminded him of Cúcuta, the city on the border with Venezuela where he’d been born and raised.
Figuring he had nothing to lose, and a lot to learn and grow, Dr. Corredor presented himself at the University Hospital San Juan de Dios to ask if they had a job for a neurologist from Bogotá. They might, they said, and promised to call after a month. The call came eight months later, long after Dr. Corredor had stopped expecting it, and in February 2017 he settled in the city he would eventually place on the global stroke map.
But when he arrived the hospital had no stroke service. Stroke patients were treated as if beset by “a mysterious clinical condition” that excited no urgency or alarm.
It was a throwback to his first shift in an emergency department when he was still a student. When a stroke patient was brought in, one hour after symptom onset, he readied himself for a rapid sequence of CT scan followed by thrombolysis, only to be told to relax – “We don’t do that here.”
Having studied medicine in the expectation of being able to “do something to help someone else’s suffering”, he didn’t accept the answer, Dr. Corredor says. This was not the future he had in mind.
Years later in Armenia Dr. Corredor learned something that is known to everyone who has tried to change the future, namely that people don’t listen to you just because you’re right. Recognizing that he needed a different plan, he put his faith in the future doctors he was teaching. He would show them what he believed and make them believe in it too.
Organizing the house
“You have to organize your house before you receive visitors,” he says philosophically of what would end up as a five-year project to transform stroke management in Armenia. In 2019, an Angels-facilitated preceptorship at Carlos Molina’s Barcelona hospital made him realize how far he still had to go – “I realized I was in diapers,” he says. The following year, he turned the challenges of triaging stroke patients with Covid into an opportunity to demonstrate the merits of an organized stroke pathway.
Organizing his house also meant training for everyone, from doctors and nurses to security guards; collecting data in RES-Q – a task he carried out himself, sometimes with the assistance of students, or helped by his wife in the evenings; and forming a virtual network of young doctors including former students he had infected with his ideas.
Fielding texts at all hours from young doctors seeking advice and support gave Dr. Corredor another insight familiar to people who try to change the future – the realization, at once terrifying and exhilarating, that “if I don’t do it, no one else will”.
But in 2022, when a new future was finally in view for stroke care in Armenia, a financial decision was made to suspend the stroke service at his hospital. For the first time in five years, Dr. Corredor considered giving up.
‘You will say yes’
The turning point was a phone call from Angels consultant Claudia Guazaquillo, an important support for Dr. Corredor in the organization of an education plan. Claudia had something to show him on the website that managed the mortality indicators for different diseases in Colombia. Pre-2017, the graph for Armenia was erratic, with a lot of missing data. But from 2017 onwards, the line representing stoke mortality curved steadily downwards.
Ángel saw what Claudia wanted him to see – that thanks to the hard work, the long hours and the late-night calls, fewer people were dying.
In June 2022 he joined a private hospital in Armenia, the Clínica Central del Quindío, where he had agreed to establish a stroke centre on two conditions. The first was that he would need a dedicated person to collect data. The second was that no stroke patient would be turned away, irrespective of whether they had insurance or not. “You will say yes because it’s an emergency,” Dr. Corredor told his new employers.
A year later in September 2023 Clínica Central del Quindío became the first hospital in the region to be certified by the World Stroke Organization, an achievement soon followed by their first WSO Angels Award. Dr. Corredor used the momentum created by international recognition to expand the stroke service and solve a problem that had been bothering him for some time.
Clínica Central del Quindío had no thrombectomy service, which meant that patients with large vessel occlusion had to be referred to a hospital two hours away. Thanks to an optimized emergency transport service, of the 12 patients that had been referred to the comprehensive centre, 85 percent had left hospital with a Modified Rankin Score score of 0-2, indicating slight or no disability. Imagine what could be achieved if they could treat these patients themselves.
A bigger stage
Dr Corredor’s efforts were meanwhile starting to attract national and international attention. To his surprise he was selected as academic coordinator for the Stroke Group of the Colombian Association of Neurology. He learnt more about his own capacity for leadership as one of the young neurologists in the forefront of ALATAC, a professional organization that seeks to resolve disparities in stroke care in Latin America. And he was set a task within the WSO.
A long-standing advocate of exercise for stroke prevention, his first foray into awareness activations had been a local 6 km run against stroke. Inspired by witnessing “more than 240 people running for my ideas”, he began to dream of a world marathon against stroke and, having proposed the idea to former WSO president Prof Sheila Martins, found himself co-chair of the WSO Campaign Committee behind 2024’s # GreaterThanStroke challenge.
With his private hospital on course for four consecutive diamond awards during 2024, the new Angels Regions strategy saw Dr. Corredor expand his influence to the ambulance service, schools and local authorities. Local government support is essential if Armenia is to become an Angels Region – perhaps Colombia’s first – and Dr Corredor is becoming adept at appealing to political vanity to win support for his ideas.
Better stroke care must be an order not just a wish, he says, so it can function independently of his presence and infuence.
His drivers are both moral and personal, his vision both global and local. “I believe I must be useful to my city,” Ángel says. “This is where my family are, I have to do something for them.”
‘I didn’t accept the answer’
In a small village on the northern frontier of Colombia, not far from Cúcuta, you will find another reason why Dr Corredor won’t give up on the future he wants.
Here lives a man who once cut a powerful figure on horseback, one you might describe as a “typical Latin American man. He was a farmer and a leader. A big guy like me,” says Ángel who himself towers over most people in any room.
When this strong man felt a weakness in his arm, he thought he was just tired. At the local hospital in their remote mountain village, the doctor treated him for flu. When Dr Corredor, already a neurologist, heard what had happened he tried everything in his power to have his uncle moved to a hospital where he could receive the proper care.
But what was done couldn’t be undone. The stroke left the powerful farmer bedridden with hemiplegia, dysarthria, epilepsy and an overwhelming sadness. It left Dr Corredor even more deeply convinced of the need to do something, to work continuously against the suffering of his family and his uncle. His response was the same as it had been in that ER many years ago: “I didn’t accept the answer.”
A flame in the soul
In October 2024, at the World Stroke Congress in Abu Dhabi, Dr Corredor witnessed something extraordinary. Others saw it too and no one would forget it.
As Angels project lead Jan van der Merwe tells it, he had run into Dr Chrissi Tunkle, a German neurologist who needed advice concerning her efforts to support the stroke community in Nepal. Jan, who had just been talking to Claudio Jiménez, knew just the man. At the Angels exhibition booth, he introduced Chrissi to Claudio and his colleague, Ángel Corredor, and then watched the magic of the Angels community unfold.
Jan recalls: “Claudio explained how he mentored new treating hospitals in circumstances similar to those in Nepal, and encouraged them to create their own communities within their hospital. Chrissi then called the Nepalese delegation over to meet Claudio and learn how to apply these strategies in Nepal.
“Soon an impromptu workshop had formed around a small table next to our booth, where the seven Nepalese doctors, Claudio and Ángel from Colombia, and Chrissi from Germany, were all passionately discussing how to help the Nepalese improve their stroke care.”
It was, said Jan, the most vivid example he had seen of the power of the Angels community, this spontaneous gathering of like-minded people with one goal – “to help each other provide the best outcomes for their patients”.
It left a deep impression on everyone, including Ángel. Within ten minutes, he says, a symposium had been arranged out of nothing, to talk about how to create a stroke center and a stroke network. “There was no organization or preparation. It wasn’t part of the congress; it wasn’t on the agenda.”
What he has learnt is that it’s not always necessary to be on the agenda.
“What you need is leadership and passion. In medicine, we are taught rules and checklists, but the checklist alone doesn’t bring about change. With leadership and passion you can make a flame in the soul of somebody so that they wake up and realize, ‘I can do this’.”
