Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what progress his Department has made on increasing access to mechanical thrombectomy services for stroke patients.

Increasing access to thrombectomy services across England for those patients who have suffered a stroke is a multi-year programme within the NHS Long Term Plan. Thrombectomy is available in 22 centres in England, with another two non-neuroscience centres currently under development.

There are additional plans to increase the number of operators able to perform thrombectomy. Due to training requirements this is currently restricted to interventional neuroradiologists in England. Over the past two years, we have worked with the General Medical Council to develop a credentialing programme which would enable acceleration of training to a wider cohort of medical professions such as radiologists, interventional cardiologists and neurosurgeons.