Doubling of average waits for critical stroke treatments

Stroke patients in England are waiting an average of almost seven hours for a specialist bed, double the wait reported before Covid.

National performance against key measures collected by the Sentinel Stroke National Audit Programme has nosedived, with patients in England waiting an average of almost seven hours to be admitted to a specialist unit in 2022-23, compared to three and a half hours in 2019-20.

NHS England guidance states that every patient with acute stroke should be given rapid access to a stroke unit within four hours. This time frame is considered critical, as patients can only be given clot-busting drugs, and treatments such as thrombectomy, which surgically removes a clot, within the first few hours of stroke onset.

However, this was achieved in just 40% of cases last year (2022-23), down from 61% in 2018-19.

Juliet Bouverie, CEO of the Stroke Association, urged ministers to give trusts what they needed to reverse the decline, saying: “Stroke is a medical emergency and every minute is critical.

“We are very concerned to see that, far from improving over the last year, the proportion of stroke patients being admitted to a stroke ward within the timescale for thrombolysis has continued to decline. This is putting patient recoveries at risk and strain on the rest of the health system.

“We believe that early supported discharge, when done correctly, with adequately resourced community teams, can help to alleviate capacity pressures in acute stroke units. However, this is not a silver bullet. There are longstanding workforce issues which are affecting patient flow in, through and out of stroke units and we call on DHSC to properly address these in the workforce plan.”

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Source: HSJ, 2 January 2024