Ireland ‘heading for a crisis’ on strokes

George Byrne was holding down two jobs and getting by with just over four hours sleep every night when he suffered a stroke.

“I was very busy. I used to drive a rigid lorry, and that was a very physical job. I also drove a taxi every week-end. I was getting just four and a half hours sleep most nights. I was 56 years old but still thought I was a young lad,” he recalls.

One night he went to bed early: “I was reading a book to help me sleep, but when I put it down, the room started spinning, and I got violently sick. My wife, Teresa, called the ambulance — that arrived very quickly because it was in the vicinity.”

He got to Naas General Hospital within 50 minutes of having the stroke and got the treatment he needed.

Yesterday, George, now 60, attended the launch of the Irish Heart Foundation’s new Stroke Manifesto — a 12-point blueprint to eliminate preventable death and disability from stroke.

George is thankful he got support from the brain injury organisation, Headway, in rebuilding his skills to achieve the best quality of life possible. However, there is a concern now that underfunded stroke services are unable to cope with Ireland’s increasing stroke rate.

The outgoing head of the HSE’s national stroke programme, Prof Joe Harbison, said that after five years of dramatic improvement, stroke patient outcomes were in decline. He blamed the double effect of persistent service deficits and a rapid growth in the rate of stroke in Ireland, which it is estimated will soar by a further 50% over the next eight years.

“We are heading for a crisis. Our stroke services can’t even deal with the numbers we have now, let alone the surge in cases that has already started due to our ageing population.”

“We don’t need extra money to fix things — we just need to invest in treatment, so we don’t have to send so many patients unnecessarily to expensive nursing home care,” he said.

Prof Harbison launches stroke manifesto "we are facing a stroke crisis with 45% increase in 3 yrs" #unitedforstroke pic.twitter.com/SLQWSKdRuL

— Irish Heart Foundation (@Irishheart_ie) April 11, 2017

TV presenter Brendan Courtney, who is an advocate for better home care provision for the elderly, said he is appalled that deteriorating hospitals services are driving more patients into long-term care when it would be cheaper to meet their wish to stay at home: “When are we going to put patients first?”

Mr Courtney’s RTÉ documentary We Need to Talk About Dad showed how his family battled to get care for his father when he suffered a stroke two years ago.

The fashion designer also wants to know why people around his age (45) are suffering from strokes — he was treated for a blood clot in his upper body five years ago and suffers from hereditary hypertension: “I have been given as many warning signals as a person can be to address it.”