Written question WQ94887

Improving emergency ambulance response times, including for people who have experienced stroke, includes work by:

• The Welsh Ambulance Services NHS Trust to reduce sickness absence and manage more people in the community

• Health boards’ plans to improve emergency department processes

• Local authorities to improve flow through the healthcare system.

We are supporting delivery of these improvements through extra funding and our national improvement programmes and networks. We are investing more than £180m this year to support health boards and regional partnership boards to safely manage more people in the community; avoid ambulance transport and admission to hospital and deliver integrated solutions with social care services to improve flow through hospitals.

The standards and quality of life outcomes are set out in the Stroke Quality Statement, which was published in 2022.

When a stroke happens, time saves lives. A new pathway for supporting paramedics at the point of care is being tested in Wales. This was initiated in April 2024 and is based on a small-scale trial in Cardiff and the Vale of Glamorgan to connect stroke specialists to paramedics.

A national project board has been established to undertake a national trial of pre-hospital video triage for stroke presentations. Trials have started at five hospitals – Wrexham Maelor, Withybush, Morriston, UHW and the Grange – in collaboration with the Welsh Ambulance Service NHS Trust.

The trial is also collecting data on the effectiveness and to test how much it is improving rates of timely thrombolysis and thrombectomy. It will inform subsequent plans to enable direct-to-scan admission for positive stroke presentations, optimising the benefit of the recent investment in Brainomix AI to help diagnosis and treatment.

Between October 2023 and April 2024 all health boards rolled out the Brainomix platform, which uses AI to speed up the accurate diagnosis and treatment of stroke.