Stroke patients face seven-hour waits for specialist care

 Which means your stroke hospital still has to to have 100% recovery protocols regardless of entry time. NO EXCUSES ALLOWED. Leaders prepare and deliver on challenges! Even getting them there in 4 hours is not enough; tPA full recovery is only 12% so your doctor and hospital still haveto have  protocols needed for 100% recovery post tPA or brain bleed stoppage.

 Stroke patients face seven-hour waits for specialist care

Waiting times for stroke patients have doubled, with average delays of seven hours for specialist care, official data show.

NHS England guidance states that every patient with acute stroke should be given access(NOT GOOD ENOUGH! Survivors still want full recovery! Don't shrink from your responsibility.) to a stroke unit within four hours.

The timeframe is considered critical because patients can be given only clot-busting drugs and treatments such as thrombectomy, which surgically removes a clot, within the first few hours of stroke onset.

But the figures for 2022-23 show it being hit in just four in 10 cases. Overall, patients in England were waiting an average of six hours 49 minutes to be admitted to a specialist unit in 2022-23, compared to three hours 32 minutes in 2019-20.

The analysis of NHS data by the Health Service Journal found University Hospitals Sussex had the longest average waits last year, of more than 14 hours, with just eight per cent of patients seen within four hours.

The trust said the service had since moved into a new £500 million hospital in Brighton which was helping to speed up care through an acute stroke assessment area.

Some trusts said ambulance handover delays appeared to be fuelling waiting times. Many of the worst-affected units were in areas with significant handover delay problems, particularly the South West.

The figures are for 2022-23, when many parts of the country saw the worst ambulance handover delays on record. But recent weeks have seen several areas with long delays.

Just before Christmas, the heads of the NHS trusts with the worst ambulance queues were hauled in front of Victoria Attkins, the Health Secretary, and ordered to “buck up their ideas”.

Juliet Bouverie, the chief executive of the Stroke Association, called for urgent action to tackle the problem, saying: “Stroke is a medical emergency and every minute is critical.

“We are very concerned to see that, far from improving over the past 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.”

She said stroke units needed more support from community teams to free up beds, with an expansion in the workforce for stroke care needed.

NHS England cited record demand for emergency care, adding that response times for category two 999 calls have improved since last year.

A spokesman for NHS England said: “Thanks to ongoing improvements in NHS stroke care, more people than ever are surviving a stroke.

“The NHS is committed to delivering the highest-quality stroke services possible by increasing the speed that people are seen and treated and increasing the number of patients accessing thrombectomy, thrombolysis and stroke rehabilitation.”