Health: Stroke

Baroness Wall of New Barnet Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd July 2014 Grand Committee

[Baroness Wall of New Barnet (Lab)]

My Lords, I, too, thank my noble friend for raising this serious issue. For many of us, hearing the numbers has come as a surprise. I acknowledge the support I have had from the Stroke Association in getting together some of the research. I had certainly not heard of young children having strokes before my noble friend Lady Wheeler brought this subject to our attention. Looking at the statistics, it is alarming that around 400 young children have a stroke every year. A significant proportion can easily die as a result, and those who survive the impact of a stroke can perhaps be immensely more disabled, physically and emotionally, than they would have been had they been seen sooner.

As with strokes affecting adults, a quick diagnosis and rapid treatment are essential to help save lives and reduce the longer-term impacts in children and younger people. However, research recently carried out into childhood strokes in the UK shows that significant delays exist in diagnosis, with more than half of cases taking longer than 24 hours to be confirmed. This is because, as I said earlier, it is not something that one automatically expects.

I am now chairman of Milton Keynes Hospital NHS Foundation Trust. I was chairman of Barnet and Chase Farm until a month ago. In preparation for speaking today and considering the seriousness of the subject, I was delighted that I had the opportunity to speak to Kate Swailes, who is matron of paediatrics. Although Milton Keynes does not have a children’s stroke unit, it has an incredible adult stroke unit. During our discussion I tried to understand exactly what she would see if a child came into A&E. She confirmed that it was very difficult to identify whether a young person had had a stroke. Her view was that if they knew the child had sickle cell disease, or had had a fall or an RTA, they certainly would scan them. However, she was concerned that because clinicians did not get a lot of exposure to this, they might not be up to speed with it.

Kate Swailes did a lot of homework over the weekend before speaking to me on Monday and rang me this morning to wish me luck with this debate. She told me that she and her fellow clinicians, working with the OTs, physios and speech and language therapists, have now designed a poster, like the Act FAST campaign, and have put “This could be a child” across the top. Nobody has done that before as far as they are aware, so I was thrilled to bits, as I am sure that everybody listening will be. They have done that at Milton Keynes and want to make sure that the Minister is aware of it. Perhaps it is one of the answers to the Stroke Association’s question about what other tools we can make available for the recognition of children’s stroke.

The noble Lord, Lord Lingfield, mentioned Andy Marr. The main shock of reading about this hit home when I listened to Jackie Ashley, his partner and a Guardian journalist, when she came to my trust just a fortnight ago to recognise one of the initiatives that one of our academic nurses has undertaken, to get all the occupational therapists, speech therapists and physios together. She has put an accredited module together. All the nurses working on stroke wards at Milton Keynes now have this additional training module which makes them even more conscious of what they are looking for when they see a stroke patient and what they can do to assist before and after the therapist has already attended.

We have already made gains in having this discussion, but I say to the Minister—and I am sure that he is receptive to this—that the recognition that this debate is giving to the issue must be raised much higher in the health service. Is it possible to do something inside the department?