About Angels Stroke Heroes : Inspiring the Global Stroke Community
The Angels Stroke Heroes podcast series features individuals who inspire the global stroke community with their courage, vision, leadership, and hard work.
Dr Zana Mohamed is head of neurology at Iraq’s first diamond hospital. As well as leading the neurology department at Shar Teaching Hospital, he is assistant professor of clinical neurology at the College of Medicine at the University of Sulaimani in Kurdistan, and program director of neurology in the Kurdistan high council of medical specialties.
When we first interviewed Dr Zana in 2024 < https://www.angels-initiative.com/angels-community/stories/courage-stamina-dreams>, along with his team of young residents, his department had just won a WSO Angels gold award. The framed certificate, displayed in a hospital corridor, told the story of an eight-year battle to open Iraq’s first stroke unit. But it said even more.
As senior resident Dr Kaiwan Kawa explained: “This award is proof that the doctors and nurses in Iraq have the capacity to achieve something great; it is a testimony to our energy and potential. The award gives us a standpoint, a hope. It means we can say to young people, look, we are capable. We are capable of making big changes and reaching our potential.”
Shar Hospital reached diamond status in Q2 of 2026.
In this episode:
The journey to Iraq’s first stroke unit
The unstoppable force of empathy
The beautiful city of Sulaymani.
Becoming a doctor
The link between music and the brain
Respecting every moment of life
Find out more about the Angels Initiative:
www.angels-initiative.com
17 Sept 2026
Dr Asel Kerimkulova | This is only the beginning
NOTE: This podcast was recorded in Russian
The name, Asel Kerimkulova, is synonymous with better stroke care in Kyrgyzstan where she has systematically transformed the outlook for stroke patients by leading the creation and update of clinical treatment guidelines, establishing a nationwide stroke network, and enabling the first thrombolysis in 2025.
A nominee in this year’s Spirit of Excellence Awards, neurologist and stroke specialist Dr Kerimkulova is the chief neurologist for the Ministry of Health of the Kyrgyz Republic, as well as Kyrgyzstan’s national coordinator for the European Stroke Organization, and an expert collaborator with the World Health Organization (WHO).
She also works alongside regional health and education experts to deploy public health campaigns like the FAST Heroes campaign, which educate communities on early stroke symptom detection.
In this podcast, recorded in Maastricht in May 2026, Angels consultant Lev Prystupiuk engages Dr Kerimkulova in a wide-ranging conversation that offers insights into a decade of stroke care transformation in Kyrgyzstan.
In this episode:
The journey towards transformation
Working with the WHO
Working within the Ministry of Health
Passion for FAST Heroes
Setting the standard for stroke care
Collaboration with neighboring countries and beyond
Vision for the next 10 years
Find out more about the Angels Initiative:
www.angels-initiative.com
28 Aug 2026
Dr Robert Mikulik | Ideas for a Revolution
Dr Robert Mikulik has big ideas, and some of these are changing the future of healthcare.
He is Professor of Neurology and the Director of the Stroke Research Programme at St. Anne’s University Hospital and Masaryk University in Brno, Chief of Physicians at Tomas Bata Hospital in Zlin, one of the co-founders of the ICRC, which is one of the biggest research infrastructural projects in the Czech Republic, and a founding member and long-serving chair of ESO-EAST, the program to improve stroke care in Central and Eastern European Countries.
He’s also the founder and coordinator of the stroke registry RES-Q, which, as he explains in this interview recorded in Maastricht, began as a tool to benchmark quality in Eastern Europe.
“When we started to discuss quality improvement in Eastern Europe, the first major barrier was that we had no data about what the quality was. So we realized that we needed to have some tool that would measure the quality. And that was the start of RES-Q. . .”
Ten years later that tool has become sophisticated beyond expectations, Robert says.
“RES-Q is not a registry anymore. It’s kind of like an intelligence platform that does a lot of automated analysis, you know, benchmarking and many other things. So the registry is only a small part.”
Robert is the mastermind behind RES-Q+, an EU-funded project that promises to be a comprehensive solution for improving acute stroke care and life after stroke. It’s a revolutionary concept whose aims are to offer a fully automated tool for obtaining and processing data, evaluating that data, and providing feedback to care providers through artificial intelligence-based virtual assistants that precisely target problem areas. Finally, it will create virtual assistants for stroke patients that monitor their condition.
In this episode
Do awards change clinical practice?
How RES-Q emerged out of ESO-EAST
Growing beyond a registry
The 3 barriers RES-Q + must overcome
AI’s side effect
Developing a new comprehensive center
Quality improvement is more managerial than medical
Medicine as “the most meaningful option”
Why stroke neurology
Introducing simulation training to stroke
How big ideas arrive
The next big idea
What medicine and aviation have in common
Find out more about the Angels Initiative:
www.angels-initiative.com
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