Hospital stroke centre will offer 'gold standard' care for city

Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust is one of only a handful of health trusts across the country to provide the newly centralised service.

Stroke patients were previously treated at separate departments at both the Royal Hallamshire and Northern General hospitals.

From now on, paramedics will automatically take any patients suspected of suffering a stroke to the new centre at the Royal Hallamshire, where they will be treated by a specialist team.

A team of stroke nurse specialists will provide an assessment as soon as the patient arrives from the ambulance, before transferring them to the hospital's new high-dependency stroke unit.

Once they have been cared for on the high-dependency ward, patients will move to one of three wards forming the stroke unit, where they will be looked after by a specialist team of stroke doctors, nurses and therapists.

When they are fit to be released from the Royal Hallamshire, that same stroke team will arrange for them to be cared for closer to home, by NHS staff based in communities around the city.

The nurse consultant for stroke care at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, Amanda Jones, said: "We are absolutely delighted to be able to offer this gold standard of care to our patients.

"A new national stroke strategy was published by the Department of Health and highlighted the fact that stroke needed to be treated as a medical emergency and treated as a 'brain attack' along similar lines to a heart attack.

"It stated that patients needed to be brought into hospital as soon as possible to receive expert specialist care, and be assessed for new treatments such as thrombolysis, or a clot buster, which can not only save lives but can prevent disability often resulting from stroke."

Ms Jones added that the new service would be an improvement on the previous stroke treatments available at Sheffield's two hospitals.

She said: "Sheffield has been fortunate in having a well-established comprehensive stroke service at both the Northern General Hospital and Royal Hallamshire Hospital sites but, although the service was good, it needed to further develop and improve.

"To ensure that patients in Sheffield receive the best possible stroke care, it was felt necessary to bring the service together under one roof.

"This would ensure that all the expert staff working in both hospitals would pool their skills and expertise, and work closely with the neurology department which is based at the Hallamshire Hospital."

The Stroke Association's regional manager for Yorkshire and Humber, Julia MacLeod, said she was "very pleased" to see the new centralised stroke unit open in the city.

She said: "Research has found that people in stroke units have a 25 per cent higher survival rate than those treated in general wards, so the facility is potentially life-saving for people in Sheffield and surrounding areas.

"The Stroke Association provides a number of services to stroke survivors after they are discharged from the unit, so this move will make it easier for people to access our help, advice and support."

The service at the Royal Hallamshire Hospital is also improving the management of Transient Ischaemic Attacks, known as "mini strokes" – stroke symptoms that usually disappear within minutes or hours.

It will ensure that those patients who are at high risk of a full stroke following an attack are investigated, assessed and given the appropriate medication within 24 hours.