The Main Components of Stroke Unit Care: Answer to Dr. Peter Langhorne's Comments.

摘要

The article 'The main components of stroke unit care' describes a survey of European stroke experts who were asked to identify what they believed to be the main components of organised stroke unit care. This form of consensus gathering can have a useful role where there is a need to summarise clinician opinion with the aim of driving up standards of care, particularly where reliable clinical evidence is not available. What then is the value in doing such an exercise around stroke unit care, which has been relatively well researched and described [2-4] ? The authors' justification is that there is little evidence about the relative merits of different types of stroke unit. What this really means is that we lack evidence about different services that are often linked to a stroke unit, in particular hyperacute assessment and management. In fact, the evidence base for the basic pathway of 'routine, multidisciplinary stroke unit care appears strong and uncontro-versial and has been remarkably consistent across the different randomised trials , It is reassuring'that the consensus process has given top priority to a number of features of this pathway; for example staffing with a co-ordinated multidisciplinary team including specialist stroke nurses and early physiotherapy.