Tonic As Hospital Leads Way

By Steve Johnson

WALSALL Hospitals Trust will be leading the way with Health Secretary Alan Johnson’s new stroke strategy.

The Department of Health has carried out an extensive consultation on stroke services, with its findings published this week.

Around 110,000 people suffer a stroke each year, with 20 to 30 per cent of those dying within a month.

Stroke is responsible for 11 per cent of deaths in England and Wales, and is the third largest cause of death in the UK as a whole.

A lynchpin of the strategy is that all suspected acute stroke patients are scanned for suitability for treatment with thrombolysing drugs.

Walsall’s Manor Hospital launched its own specialist service in August 2007 and has already successfully treated five people.

Stroke services lead Dr Elliot Epstein explained that thrombolysis entails administration of a ‘clot busting’ drug called alteplase. The drug breaks down the clot in the artery and restores blood flow to the brain, thereby reducing the chance of disability and even death.

West Midlands Ambulance Service personnel have all been trained to carry out the Face-Arms-Speech Test, as set out in the new stroke strategy.

Suspected stroke patients are taken direct to A&E at the Manor Hospital where they are automatically given priority for computerised tomography (CT scan) which helps in determining who is suitable for thrombolysing with clot-busting drugs.

(c) 2007 Evening Mail; Birmingham (UK). Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.