MRI facilities for stroke patients worse than less developed countries
 The national press is continuing to be critical of services for stroke patients after an international report showed that Britain has one of the lowest numbers of MRI and CT machines per head of population in the world. Countries such as Turkey, Poland and Hungary are said to provide significantly more resources for stroke care than the UK.
In a league table of 30 countries, only Mexico fares worse than the United Kingdom, which has 5.8 CT scanners per 100,000 population. This compares with 8.7 in the Slovak Republic, 7.3 in Turkey, 6.3 in Poland and 6.9 in Hungary.
Another report by the House of Commons' public accounts committee claims that annually 550 people die and thousands more suffer brain damage because of delays in access to treatment. The committee's chairman, Edward Leigh, suggested that this was because the NHS and the Department of Health regard stroke victims as being too old to merit better care.
Government targets on stroke care have been missed and experts say that hospitals are still failing to provide specialist stroke units, despite evidence that they save lives and speed up recovery, according to The Sunday Telegraph.
While the Department of Health has strategies to modernise services for cancer and coronary heart disease, tackling stroke is confined to a chapter of the National Services Framework for Older People 2001. Its key target was for all hospitals to have dedicated, specialist stroke units up and running by 2004. In England, only 85 per cent of trusts now have a unit, while in Wales the figure is 30 per cent.
Tony Rudd, a stroke specialist at Guys and St Thomas's hospitals in London, was quoted as saying: "In some cases trusts simply put a sign on the door saying, 'Stroke Unit', and that isn't good enough. We need to see a multidisciplinary team of stroke consultants, neurologists, nurses and physiotherapists. We need more radiographers to run the MRI and CT scanners. If we invest in these things we will end up with fewer disabilities, and that, ultimately, will cost society less."
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