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Susan W. Law, DO, MPH

Susan W. Law, DO, MPH

Neurology Attending Physician
NYC Health + Hospitals/Kings County

Providing Stroke Care in Brooklyn

Dr. Susan Law spent her childhood in her father’s Chinatown clinic, helping with supplies and inventory and handling the waiting room. She brings that same community connection to her work at NYC Health + Hospitals/Kings County, where she is a neurologist and director of the Stroke Center and makes herself so available to her patients that they even check in on their travel plans.

“I was young and didn’t realize things like health disparities,” she said of those days in her dad’s clinic. Although the national average age of stroke is 70, in her Brooklyn community it is slightly younger at 67. Stroke is personal to Dr. Law, who lost her grandfather to stroke in his 40s, an uncle to stroke and a grandmother who died in her 60s after suffering three strokes.

“Whether they come to us by ambulance or walk-in triage, our patients have made a choice to come here, a choice to be better,” she said. “Our service is a promise to our community that they can trust us when they make that choice.”

Kings County has been one of a handful of hospitals in the public health system to receive national recognition for improving quality of care and outcomes for stroke patients, winning awards from the American Heart Association and the American Stroke Association for consistently applying best-practice, research-based standards of care that reduce recovery time, disability and mortality rates for stroke patients, as well as reducing hospital readmissions for stroke patients.

When she took over in 2014, Dr. Law brought the stroke unit from zero patients in 2008 to 700 patients a year now, winning a prestigious Stroke Gold Plus Award year after year – including a five-year streak. On average, someone in the U.S. suffers a stroke every 40 seconds, someone dies of a stroke every four minutes and nearly 800,000 people suffer a new or recurrent stroke each year. But it must battle against Dr. Law’s 24/7 vigilance.

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