The NHS has not made a “life-changing” treatment for stroke available around the clock across England despite ministers repeatedly promising that it would.
The health service was expected to improve stroke care by making a clot removal technique called mechanical thrombectomy available everywhere in the country 24/7 from 1 April.
Doctors describe it as a gamechanging intervention that, if done quickly, can help someone who has had a severe stroke avoid ending up with a serious disability as a result.
However, seven of England’s 24 regional stroke centres are still not providing thrombectomy on an all-hours basis, mainly because they do not have enough doctors and other staff to do so.
Experts fear the NHS’s failure to deliver universal 24/7 access to the treatment could mean patients who have a stroke overnight, in the evening or at weekends in underserved areas may become avoidably severely disabled, or may even die, because they could not have the procedure.
More than 100,000 people a year in the UK have a stroke, of whom 38,000 die and many others are left with life-changing disabilities that rob them of their independence.
Dr Sanjeev Nayak, a stroke specialist at the Royal Stoke hospital in Stoke, said: “A patient presenting during normal working hours in a well-served area may receive rapid, life-changing treatment, whereas the same patient presenting at night or in a different region may not receive thrombectomy at all. This creates a real postcode lottery in access to one of the most effective treatments in modern medicine.”
Source: The Guardian, 6 April 2026
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