What are the Clinical Standards for Stroke Care in Scotland?
Scottish Stroke Care Standards
NHS Quality Improvement Scotland (NHS QIS) produced clinical standards for Stroke Services in March 2004. Scotland’s action plan for health and wellbeing Better Health, Better Care highlighted stroke as a national clinical priority. These standards were revised in June 2009 following publication of SIGN 108 in December 2008.
The NHS QIS standards focus on those parameters which have the best evidence for having an effect on patient outcomes, e.g. stroke unit care, swallow screening, brain imaging, acute aspirin use, delays to assessment in specialist neurovascular clinics, delivery of thrombolysis and early carotid intervention.
In 2012 the National Advisory Committee for Stroke (NACS) at the Scottish Government the Scottish Stroke Care Audit (SSCA) Steering Committee reviewed the current NHS QIS Standards for Stroke Care (June 2009) in collaboration with Scottish Stroke Managed Clinical Networks (MCN) and colleagues in the wider Scottish stroke community.
The proposed Scottish Stroke Care Standards were agreed, and implemented on 1st January 2013. These standards are now reviewed on an annual basis.
The current Scottish Stroke Care Standards are available to access here. More details are available on the next page.
Page last reviewed: 10 Aug 2022
