The specialist shortage is not the problem! LACK OF 100% RECOVERY PROTOCOLS IS THE PROBLEM! Are you that blitheringly stupid? These specialists have nothing that will get survivors 100% recovered! That is the only goal in stroke for survivors!
GET THERE!
NHS stroke specialist shortage leaving thousands dead or severely disabled, doctors say
Thousands of people in the UK are at risk death or severe disability due to a lack of NHS stroke specialists, senior doctors have warned.
A chronic shortage of stroke consultants means patients face delays to clot-busting drugs and surgery, with horrendous consequences, they said.
Prof David Werring, past president of the British and Irish Association of Stroke Physicians (BIASP), said: “People are either dying or living with disability unnecessarily because they’re not getting the correct evaluation and treatment by the right expert at the right time.”
About 100,000 people across the UK have a stroke each year.
Between 10,000 and 20,000 of them died or sustained a serious disability because of treatment delays linked to staff shortages, said Dr Sanjeev Nayak, a senior stroke specialist at Royal Stoke hospital.
“It is heartbreaking to see the real and avoidable impact that workforce shortages have on patient outcomes.
In my experience workforce shortages directly lead to avoidable disability and, in some cases, avoidable death,” said Nayak, a consultant interventional radiologist.
“It is reasonable to estimate that around 10-20 per cent of stroke patients each year are left avoidably dead or more disabled than they otherwise would have been because of delays in the system.
“Those delays are multifactorial, but workforce shortages are a major, repeatedly identified contributor.”
The most recent Sentinel Stroke national audit programme report found it took four hours and 11 minutes to get someone who had had a stroke to hospital in 2024-25, more than 90 minutes longer than a decade ago.
Just 46.5 per cent of stroke patients last year were admitted to a specialist stroke unit within four hours of arrival, down more than 10 percentage points on a decade ago.
New research by BIASP surveyed 100 hospitals in England providing acute stroke care and found:
- 70 per cent of stroke units are short of at least one consultant, and many are two down
- 53 of 84 hospitals that responded had vacancies for a total of 96 consultants
- 10 per cent of the NHS’s 423 permanent consultants are due to retire in the next five years
Dr Louise Shaw, BIASP’s current president, said some smaller hospitals did not have a senior specialist on duty around the clock.
“That’s very unacceptable,” Shaw said.
“All patients admitted to a hospital with an acute stroke should have access to an immediate stroke consultant opinion and advice on their care. And at the moment that’s not available.”
Key treatments such as thrombolysis, which uses drugs to dissolve a clot, and mechanical thrombectomy, surgery to remove a blood clot from the brain, are extremely time-critical.
Nayak said: “When services are understaffed, patients miss treatment windows altogether or are treated too late, resulting in far worse neurological outcomes that could have been prevented.
“Delays in specialist assessment or transfer to a thrombectomy centre can mean the difference between independent recovery and devastating, lifelong disability, or not surviving at all.”
The Stroke Association said patients were being denied “time-critical, life-changing” treatment because of staff shortages.
The situation threatens Labour’s pledge to cut deaths from heart disease and stroke by 25 per cent by 2035.
A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said the NHS had 7,000 more doctors than the same time last year. “And our upcoming workforce plan will set out how we ensure the NHS has the right people in the right places, with the right skills to care for patients when they need it.”
The number of people in the UK who have a stroke is expected to rise from 100,000 to 151,000 a year by 2035, according to Stroke Association analysis.
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