STROKE services are to get an £850,000 overhaul after health bosses admitted west Kent was “behind the game.”

West Kent Primary Care Trust (PCT) is putting the money into stroke services and has set up a strategy group involving the PCT, hospital trusts and the ambulance service.

For years, stroke services in west Kent have been ranked poor in national reviews, despite strokes being the UK’s third biggest killer, behind heart disease and cancer.

Outside the hours of 8am to 8pm, nowhere in Kent provides thrombolysis, a clot-busting treatment which has to be delivered within three hours of a person suffering a certain type of serious stroke.

This situation is changing in east Kent, where hospitals will soon offer thrombolysis via an on-call consultant.

In west Kent, a TIA (transient ischaemic attack) clinic has been running at Maidstone Hospital since March. It has seen 62 patients who have suffered a TIA, which is like a mini-stroke and can be an early warning of a full stroke, allowing doctors to monitor their condition.

Dr Chris Thom, elder care consultant at Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust, is implementing the improvements.

He said: “Clinicians have been tearing their hair out knowing we have not been able to give an optimal stroke service.

“We have been behind the game but there is now a real commitment to developing these services and making them as good as anywhere in the UK.”

The trust’s chief executive, Glenn Douglas, pledged to set up the hospital stroke units at a health rally in November, organised by the KM and Downs Mail in the wake of the C-diff report.