Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what assessment he has made of the effect of local sustainability and transformation plans on geographical variations in stroke care.

Health economies have come together to develop Sustainability and Transformation Plans (STPs) for their footprints until 2020/21. As with the current arrangements for planning and delivery, there are layers of plans which can sit below STPs, with shared links and dependencies. STPs do not replace the existing system architecture or provide details on all individual clinical areas. Rather STPs act as an umbrella, holding underneath them a number of different specific plans to address key local issues. As such, for conditions such as Stroke, it is not expected that STPs will provide great levels of detail regarding all the Stroke related activity occurring across the Footprint.

Visibility will be provided through other mechanisms such as audits. Stroke data is collected by the national audit from all trusts and reported at both trust and clinical commissioning group (CCG) level. The Royal College of Physicians which runs the audit has not done an analysis to compare services between rural and urban CCGs. However the data is available in the public domain for researchers should they wish to do so.