NHS staff shortages 'causing deaths and disabilities' post-stroke

Thousands of people who have had a stroke are ending up severely disabled or dead because the NHS has too few specialists to treat them quickly enough, senior doctors have said.

- Denis Campbell

A chronic shortage of stroke consultants across the NHS means that patients are suffering horrendous consequences because of delays in getting clot-busting drugs and surgery, they warn.

"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," Prof David Werring, the past president of the British and Irish Association of Stroke Physicians (BIASP), told the Guardian.

Many hospitals cannot urgently diagnose stroke patients and give them time-critical treatment to maximise their chances of a full recovery "because we haven't got enough consultants", Werring said. "The shortage means that when people have an acute stroke, they cannot be sure of receiving an expert consultant opinion to get the right diagnosis and the right treatment at the right time."

About 100,000 people across the UK have a stroke each year. Between 10,000 and 20,000 of them die or sustain a serious disability because of treatment delays often linked to staff shortages, said Dr Sanjeev Nayak, a senior stroke specialist at Royal Stoke university 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.