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Contribution to the debate on Stroke Services

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I do not really want to say an awful lot, as much of it has been said already by the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Mr. Lansley), who is a fellow officer of the all-party stroke group, by the hon. Member for Romsey (Sandra Gidley), who is a colleague of mine on the Select Committee on Health, and by the Secretary of State. All three have covered carefully most of the main points, which are pretty well known.

The point that the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire made—that we have known for quite a long time some of the things that we need to do to improve our stroke care services—is true. Like him, I thought for a while about why we are putting out a consultation document now—and I see that there is great merit in doing so because, despite what my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich, North (Dr. Gibson) said about world-class services, there are only odd islands of world-class services in this country, and we are very far from having a world-class service throughout the country as a whole.

The questionnaire should be used to say to every primary care trust responsible for commissioning services and to every acute trust responsible for providing them, “We want your response in the light of what is in the document prepared by Roger Boyle over quite a long period”—although as we have heard, Professor Boyle has been working on strokes for only a year, whereas he worked on heart disease for a much longer period. If we can get a response back from everyone who is responsible, that will at least mean that they will have read and studied what is in the document. Many of those things have been said before in documents, but I should like the Minister, when she replies to the debate, to give an undertaking to try to ensure that there is a response from all those responsible for commissioning and providing services......

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I said that to argue that a specific percentage of scans was achieved in 24 hours misses the point, because to distinguish the two types of attack one has to have a scan in three hours; I appreciate that the hon. Lady knows that. I was certainly not casting doubt on statistics and their use in general