Rural stroke patients benefit from telephone support

Reported by Susan Aldridge, PhD, medical journalist

When phone support was offered to doctors, more patients in rural areas received clot-busting treatment for stroke.
Living in a remote country area can pose problems when it comes to getting treatment for medical emergencies. Doctors at the Barrow Neurological Institute, Phoenix, Arizona, now describe how offering telephone support to those treating stroke patients from rural areas can help improve their care.

The main issue here was access to the clot-busting drug tissue plasminogen activator, which can save lives but is complicated to administer and is usually done at a specialist center. In this study, the patients were treated first at a small rural center, under phone guidance from specialists. Then the patients were transported to an urban center. They received their clot-buster in transit and there were no complications from doing this. A comparison of those who received their care starting in the rural center with those treated more conventionally showed no differences. What is more, the phone support enabled 53 patients to get clot-busters who would not otherwise have done so. Clearly, the phone support allows more equality of stroke treatment between patients based in the town and those based in the country.

Source
Neurology 11th January 2005

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