Officials sound alarm on ambulance stroke response times

National NHS officials have called for ambulance response times for stroke cases to be “urgently reviewed”.

A report on stroke services by Getting it Right First Time – an NHS England national programme – recommends modelling the impact of a change to the categorisation by ambulance services of suspected strokes.

The GIRFT report notes that the time between symptom onset and arrival at hospital has increased by 41 minutes over the last seven years, yet faster access to emergency stroke care gives a better chance of survival and reduces the impact on quality of life for survivors.

Strokes are currently treated as “category two” incidents, meaning they should get a response within 18 minutes.

However, patients are currently experiencing much longer waits, as average response times were more than three times this in March. Since the introduction of the current system of categorisation in 2017-18, the 18 minute target for category two calls was only ever hit for a few months, at the height of the covid pandemic, when call-outs were abnormally low.

However, when asked about the issue, Janette Turner, the academic who led research on the last official review of ambulance response times, warned that moving all suspected strokes to category one could lead to longer responses for the most serious calls.

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Source: HSJ, 4 May 2022