The Australian Stroke Clinical Registry Annual Report 2023

The Australian Stroke Clinical Registry (AuSCR) is a collaborative national effort to monitor and improve the quality of acute stroke care. This annual report provides data from patients admitted in 2023, marking 15 years of operation for the Australian Stroke Clinical Registry. During this time over 180,000 episodes of care have been captured and over 80,000 patient-reported outcome surveys were obtained.

We report data provided by 65 hospitals to the AuSCR in 2023: 29 from Victoria [VIC]; 20 from Queensland [QLD]; five from Western Australia [WA] and South Australia [SA]; three from Tasmania; two from the Australian Capital Territory [ACT], and one paediatric hospital from New South Wales [NSW].

• Information is presented on 18,090 episodes of acute stroke for 16,565 patients.
• One in five patients were transferred from another hospital.
• Patient-reported outcomes between 90-180 days were completed for 54% of eligible patients, and death information obtained for all from the National Death Index.
• Two case studies on quality improvement projects are presented
• One lived experience story is presented
• Trends in quality of indicators are shown for 2018 to 2023
• Examples of our new interactive data dashboards are described
• For the first time, we present detailed, aggregated data on patients with stroke who are younger than 18 years. Since stroke in children is rare, we have pooled data from the last 6 years. The data from Paediatric Hospitals are mostly from one hospital in Victoria (47%) that has contributed data consistently over this period for admitted cases.

The main findings from this report are that we continue to have ongoing variation in clinical care across Australian hospitals. In contrast to 2022 admissions, there were areas of improvement including more people having their swallowing ability assessed prior to oral intake, more being discharged from hospital with a care plan and prescribed antihypertensive medication. Stroke unit care improves survival, and 1 in 5 patients miss out on access to this specialised service for stroke. Care in stroke units facilitates access to in-patient rehabilitation, which is two times more likely than if treated in an alternate ward. The AuSCR was part of a group that developed and endorsed the 30/60/90 National Stroke Targets in August 2023. We are pleased to provide current national performance information towards the Targets in this report, and have also provided individual site reports with this information to our hospital contributors.

For further information please email: julie.morrison@florey.edu.au or dominique.cadilhac@monash.edu.au