NICE spells out stroke care needs

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Issue: 21 July 2010
Author: Matthew Limb

New NHS quality standards for stroke care highlight the need for patients to receive minimum levels of ‘active therapy’, including physiotherapy.

The standards, from the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, set out the high-quality care, such as acute treatment and ongoing rehabilitation, that stroke patients can expect to receive, and how it should be delivered.

Patients with stroke should be offered a minimum of 45 minutes of ‘each active therapy that is required, for a minimum of five days a week, to enable them to meet their rehabilitation goals’. This should go on ‘for as long as they continue to benefit from the therapy and are able to tolerate it’.

Active therapy is defined as face-to face-contact, which may be individual or group treatment, and may include ‘teletherapy’, says NICE. Dr Tony Rudd, a consultant stroke physician who chairs the Stroke Topic Expert Group, said: ‘At the moment, some patients are not receiving any therapy and are just doing nothing. But driving up the amount of therapy that people get has a huge impact on outcomes.’ NICE also issued separate quality standards for dementia and venous-thromboembolism and will eventually cover some 150 clinical areas in total. www.nice.org.uk/aboutnice/qualitystandards/stroke