Does adding an emergency medicine pharmacist improve acute stroke care?

Acute stroke callout team care is more rapid when an emergency pharmacist ia included: study.
Image: NTRI

Does adding an emergency medicine pharmacist improve acute stroke care? The answer is Yes, by an average of 12 minutes. A well known saying in the field of neurology is ‘time is brain’ and for this particular study it couldn’t be more true, as every minute a stroke sufferer isn't treated, more damage takes place.

Researchers from the Pharmacy Department (Faculty of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences), the Department of Neuroscience (Central Clinical School) and Department of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine (School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine) have found that by adding an emergency pharmacist to the acute stroke call-out team provided an improvement in the average time to administer treatment (thrombolysis with alteplase, or recombinant tissue plasminogen activator rtPA) to a patient by 12 minutes.

Dispelling the furphies in stroke prevention treatments

A/Prof Anne Abbott busts medical myths
around stroke treatment in her Nature
Reviews Cardiology paper

Associate Professor Anne Abbott has published a provocative, concise analysis outlining important misunderstandings about how to best prevent stroke in Nature Reviews Cardiology. 

A/Prof Abbott has an adjunct appointment in the Central Clinical School's Department of Neuroscience. She says misconceptions, or ‘furphies’, remain widespread, and their continued acceptance by medical practitioners is damaging people’s health and wasting billions of healthcare dollars around the world every year.