HSJ has reported that the national performance against key measures collected by the Sentinel Stroke National Audit Programme has plummeted, with patients with stroke 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.
Full story in the HSJ, 2 January 2024