The row over the changes to stroke services in Kent continues as Medway Council searches for more answers.

The Kent and Medway Sustainability and Transformation Partnership has said the preferred option is to open new hyper acute stroke units (HASU), which will offer emergency stroke care, at Darent Valley, Maidstone and The William Harvey Hospital in Ashford.

A final decision will be made in January after an implementation plan is put together.

But councillors and MPs are preparing to challenge the decision not to open a HASU at Medway Maritime Hospital in Windmill Road.

It was included in three of the five options considered.

MPs Rehman Chishti and Kelly Tolhurst met with the Medway Clinical Commissioning Group, which buys and plans healthcare in the Towns, on Thursday to discuss the decision.

Leader of Medway Council, Alan Jarrett, has now submitted a request under the Freedom of Information Act to find out how the preferred option was decided.

In the request, Cllr Jarrett asks for full documentation on the decision- making process, the scores for each criteria and sub-criteria for the five options, the full methodology and the names of the groups who agreed on it.

He said: “We need to find out how they made their decision and we’ve had to use an FOI to get that information.

“If you look at the deprivation in the wider area you would say it has to come here, but it hasn’t.

“We will continue to fight this until we win or it becomes a no hope. We have the full support of our local MPs.

“I don’t want to talk about the other places in the county, I’m only interested in having stroke services in Medway.”

MP for Sittingbourne and Sheppey, Gordon Henderson, has also hit out at the plans claiming his constituents are being sidelined.

He said: “To not site a stroke centre in the area of most need seems to me to be a perverse decision.

“I will now work with my Medway colleagues to have this decision reversed.

“I am very disappointed and frankly astonished.

“Medway, and its surrounding area, such as Sittingbourne and Sheppey, has the largest population in Kent.”

The hyper acute stroke unit model is designed to have expert care in three units across the county to treat patients in the first 72 hours after a stroke.

Currently, one in three people are not having a brain scan quick enough and staff are not seeing enough patients each year to keep their skills up to date.

The new units will be open for 24 hours a day, seven days a week and will give patients access to specialist treatment.

A consultation into the £40 million shake up of stroke services was announced in February when a public consultation was launched.

More than two million people were reached but only 5,000 people responded.

The main concerns raised included rehabilitation for patients.

The Kent and Medway Stroke Clinical Reference Group is looking into this and a plan will be put together over the next few months.