Inequalities in Stroke Patients' Management in English Public Hospitals: A Survey on 200,000 Patients

Antonio Ivan Lazzarino, William Palmer, Alex Bottle and Paul Aylin

PLOS ONE, 2011, vol. 6, issue 3, 1-6

Abstract: Background: According to clinical guidelines, every patient affected by stroke should be given a brain-imaging scan (BIS) - Computerized Tomography or Magnetic Resonance Imaging - immediately after being admitted to hospital. Aim of the study: To describe the variation in use of BIS among English public hospitals and identify any patient groups being excluded from appropriate care. Methods: We collected hospital administrative data for all patients admitted to any English public hospital with a principal diagnosis of stroke from 2006 to 2009. We calculated the proportion of patients treated with BIS in the whole sample and after stratification by hospital. We compared hospitals' performance using funnel plots. We performed a multiple logistic regression analysis using BIS as outcome and age, gender, socio-economic deprivation, and comorbidity as covariates. Results: In English public hospitals there are about 70,000 emergency admissions for stroke per year. Nationally, only 35% receive a BIS immediately, and only 84% receive it within the admission. There is large variation in the use of BIS for stroke patients among English public hospitals, with some of them approaching the recommended 100% and some having very low rates. Young (P

Date: 2011
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0017219 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 17219&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0017219

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0017219

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().