Shortage of NHS stroke specialists leaving thousands dead or disabled, say doctors

Key Highlights

• “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 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% 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 – in stroke physicians, nurses [and other staff] – are a major, repeatedly identified contributor.“Given that stroke affects around 100,000 people a year in the UK, this translates into many thousands of patients annually whose outcomes could have been materially better with timely access to adequately staffed stroke teams.”Nayak pointed to the annual reports produced by the Sentinel Stroke national audit programme team based at King’s College London, which assess the NHS’s performance in England, Wales and Northern Ireland against official guidelines for stroke care. Its most recent report found that it took four hours and 11 minutes to get someone who had had a stroke to hospital in 2024-25, longer than in 2023-24 and more than 90 minutes longer than a decade ago. And just 46.5% of stroke patients last year were admitted to a specialist stroke unit within four hours of their arrival in hospital, about level with the previous year but down more than 10 percentage points on a decade ago. New research undertaken by BIASP has shown that longstanding gaps in the stroke medical workforce are getting worse, despite the ageing population and unhealthy lifestyles leaving more people needing hospital treatment after a stroke. Its survey of the 100 hospitals in England that provide acute stroke care found that: 70% of stroke units are short of at least one consultant in stroke care, and many are two down.
• 53 of 84 hospitals that responded had vacancies for a total of 96 consultants.