Team-building intervention to improve acute stroke care - Authors' reply

摘要

We acknowledge that there are differences between the proportion of patients initially assessed and subsequently enrolled by hospitals allocated to receive our intervention or to the control group. However, there is no evidence that this difference has caused any imbalance between the groups or biasedthe results, particularly in terms of stroke severity-a crucial predictor of patients' outcome.Having re-examined the data in response to David Barer's comments, we can confirm that, first, there were no significant differences between eligible patients who agreed to participate and those who did not in terms of stroke severity (pre-intervention cohort p=0-49; post-intervention cohort p=O-99)- Second, and more importantly, participants in the intervention and the control group were similar for age, sex, premorbid level of dependency, stroke location, stroke severity, andtime between onset of stroke symptoms and arrival at the acute stroke unit; the only differences were a lower proportion of participants who were employed full-time in the control group and a higher proportion of participants receiving thrombolysis in the control group.