MORE THAN 18 months after appalling deficiencies in Irish stroke services were revealed in a national audit, little has been done to improve services and lives are continuing to be lost unnecessarily, the Irish Heart Foundation has said.
Its medical director Dr Brian Maurer demanded urgent action to overhaul stroke services, stressing that 500 lives a year could be saved if services were improved.
“Every day that passes without adequate stroke services results in unnecessary death and disability in our population, causing untold misery for the families of many stroke sufferers,” he said.
Launching a 16-point plan yesterday to improve services, the foundation said the problem was that many people were unaware of the symptoms of stroke.
More than 1,500 strokes or mini-strokes a year were misdiagnosed with devastating consequences, and when patients with stroke were taken to hospital, few of them received the life-saving clot busting treatment that could benefit them. In addition, many hospitals did not have stroke units where multidisciplinary care guarantees better outcomes.
“It is not acceptable that the place, time and day of a stroke largely determines whether you recover, die or live the rest of your life with a disability,” he said.
Furthermore, Dr Maurer said many patients spend months and even years in hospital, at enormous cost, in order to be able to avail of therapies that are not available in the community.
He believes if services were reorganised at little extra cost there would be major improvements in patient outcomes, saving the State €100 million a year in the long run by preventing death and disability.
Some 10,000 people suffer stroke in Ireland each year and 2,000 die from the condition.
Dr Joe Harbison, a stroke physician at Dublin’s St James’s Hospital, said stroke was now one of the most preventable, treatable and even curable conditions. But in Ireland, he said, we allow people to get as bad as they possibly can before trying to treat them. He said doctors wanted to change the system but they needed help.
Some 11 of the State’s 36 acute hospitals now have stroke units – just one stroke unit existed when the national stroke audit was completed. This is still way short of what is required and a lot less than in the UK where over 90 per cent of hospitals have stroke units.
Dr Maurer said the manifesto would be sent to Minister for Health Mary Harney and he hoped the HSE would implement it, but he noted the HSE’s track record in implementing a lot of things is “not particularly encouraging”.
Pat Kelly from Blackrock in Cork, who cared for his father after a stroke, said his sister had suffered a stroke in recent weeks while in Tunisia but couldn’t get an appointment to be seen by a specialist at Cork University Hospital until December 2nd, by which time she would be waiting 14 weeks to be seen.
“I hope if I have a stroke down in Cork I die because we don’t have the facilities,” he said.
The main symptoms of stroke include facial weakness, arm weakness and speech problems. Anyone who suspects someone is suffering a stroke should ring 999.