Prof Ken Butcher:
Stroke in Australia is the number one cause of adult disability, and it's the number three cause of death. The impact that it has on our society, at a social level but also economically, is massive. My name is Ken Butcher. I'm a neurologist and specifically a stroke neurologist, and I work at the Prince of Wales Hospital. I'm also the Director of the New South Wales Telestroke Service. I like to describe the Telestroke Service as a way of levelling the playing field. Living further away from academic centres like the one we're sitting in now puts you at a certain disadvantage because you couldn't access timely assessment and diagnosis of your stroke and, even more importantly, timely treatment of your stroke. And what the New South Wales Telestroke Service brings to those patients is state-of-the-art assessment and treatment tools in their home communities. I can be assessing them through the audiovisual link. I can be talking to them about their symptoms. I can conduct a neurologic examination and I can access their brain images. And the imaging setup that we have at these local hospitals is state-of-the-art. It is equivalent to what we offer at any of our comprehensive stroke centres right here in Sydney. I think for us as clinicians who are delivering the care, we know how to treat stroke. Our problem has always been getting the patients presented to us and getting the investigations in a timely fashion. What I would like clinicians and other specialties to know about our program is the model of care. But I think what COVID has shown us is that we do need to be creative and leverage our technology, leverage what we have to deliver the best care that we can for our patients. We can recall that what we aimed to do was bring the standard of care, the level of care offered to people in regional New South Wales up to the level that we saw or that we currently have. And this program gives us treatment opportunities on a daily and nightly basis. This has been, from a professional experience perspective, one of the most gratifying things I've ever done in my career.
