Almost a hundred lives a year have been saved by closing local stroke units in London, according to a study which suggests that hundreds of people may be dying because health chiefs elsewhere have failed to do the same.
Experts said that patients in the rest of the country should be “jumping up and down” to demand similar centralisation after research found that concentrating stroke care into specialist 24/7 units saved lives and got patients out of hospital two days quicker.
In Manchester, where similar changes were watered down to assuage local fears about hospital closures, no extra lives were saved, the study found. Health bosses there have vowed to press ahead with more radical changes and NHS England says that other cities should follow