Stroke costs could hit £75bn by 2035
UK: Strokes are costing the UK £26bn annually – and this could triple within 20 years, a charity has warned.
A new report by the Stroke Association found that strokes are taking a financial toll three times higher than estimated in 2009, which could triple to £75bn by 2035 as the population ages and care costs soar.
STROKES ARE costing the UK £26bn annually – and this could triple within 20 years if action is not taken, charity figures have suggested.
A new report by the Stroke Association found that strokes are taking a financial toll three times higher than the previous estimate in 2009.
Researchers believe the current cost could triple to £75bn by 2035, due to a growing ageing population, increasing numbers of survivors and rising care costs.
Currently informal care and private treatment accounts for most of the cost (£15.8bn), while £5.2bn is spent on formal social care and £3.4bn on care by the NHS.
Lost productivity in the workplace costs employers an additional £1.6bn annually.
Juliet Bouverie, chief executive of the Stroke Association, said “radical changes” needed to be made in how the condition was managed.
She said: “The majority of the vast financial burden caused by stroke is shouldered by thousands of families and carers, who give up everything, including their jobs, to look after loved ones whose lives are turned upside down in an instant by stroke.
“Stroke survivors without close
family are left isolated, without the long-term support they desperately need.”
The report, Current, future and avoidable costs of stroke, Part
2, was based on research at Queen Mary University of London and London School of Economics.
The latest figures mean the costs associated with strokes are roughly the same as the financial burden of dementia.
However, for every stroke sufferer £48 is spent a year on medical research – compared to £118 for each dementia patient, the charity said.
The charity is calling for a Government commitment to replace the current stroke strategy with a new national plan.
They hope this will pave the way for more stroke survivors to return to employment and live independently, while helping ease some of the emotional and financial pressures on family members.
It is also calling for further funding for stroke research, estimating that a £60 million investment now into stroke research could save £10 billion overall by 2035.
Meanwhile, the national medical director of NHS England has warned the way the health service is organised is putting patients’ lives at risk.
Prof Sir Bruce Keogh said that a central system was needed to oversee patient safety in the NHS.
He expressed concerns that in a system made up of hundreds of organisations, measures introduced to improve patient safety or address specific issues were not being put into practice across the service as a whole.
He said there needed to be a way of ensuring those directives were taken up across the industry, not just by individual bodies.
He said: “People accept that their disease has risks, they accept that the treatment may carry some risks.
“What they should never have to accept is that the way we design and deliver our services adds to that risk.
“Where there are solutions to significant safety problems, I would like to see a system that mandates the use of those solutions through the NHS.
“The difficulty that we have is that the NHS is a conglomerate of hundreds of organisations, all of whom have their own boards and people in them with their own views.”
Stroke survivors without close family are left isolated. Juliet Bouverie, chief executive of the Stroke Association.