‘I was left to crawl up the stairs’: NHS stroke service staffing crisis ‘leaving people with lifelong disabilities’

Jane Anson had walked to the fridge to get some food when her feet gave way and she crumpled to the floor.

“I just dropped like a stone. I was on the floor giggling, and my right leg and arm had gone numb.”

Ms Anson, 59, from Cornwall, didn’t realise at the time, but she was having a stroke.

Her husband, who was also at home, immediately called 999. Although she could hear him say, “she’s had a stroke”, she had no idea what was happening to her.

“My husband asked what on earth the matter was, and I spoke to him in the kitchen. I heard him say she’s had a stroke to the ambulance service.

Ms Anson was taken to North Devon District Hospital in Barnstaple on 20 September 2024 before being transferred to Derriford Hospital in Plymouth, where she underwent a life-saving specialist thrombolysis procedure, which uses drugs through an IV line or catheter to stop blood clots.

But that was just the start of her recovery. Ms Anson spent the next two months struggling with even basic tasks such as brushing her teeth, without barely any rehabilitation support from the NHS.

Ms Anson is one of potentially tens of thousands of patients missing out on this vital care and facing recovery alone, due to poor staffing within stretched community services.

There are at least 1.4 million stroke survivors in the UK, with 100,000 people affected each year. While death rates have fallen 43 per cent from 48,823 in 2001 to 27,344 in 2024, a national audit of stroke services carried out in 2025 found that not a single community team in England had the required staffing levels to give adequate care to patients. And services in Cornwall and the Isle of Scilly do not meet national staffing standards or the national standard for patient access to daily rehabilitation.

Meanwhile, the NHS’s community service waiting list continues to rise, hitting 1.1 million in January 2025 – up from 962,040 in January 2024.

Professor Deb Lowe, a stroke consultant and medical director at the Stroke Association, said despite saving more people than ever, the NHS is leaving patients with lifelong disabilities due to inadequate rehab care.

She said: “There’s no point in us giving all these amazing acute treatments, like thrombolysis and thrombectomy, and reducing the number of people dying from stroke, but then condemning them to a life of disability, and a lack of independence by not giving them rehabilitation.”

Prof Lowe warned that the biggest age group suffering from strokes in the UK are 50 to 59 year olds and said poor rehabilitation care was leaving many unable to work.

“My message to West Streeting would be, we must prioritise and give parity of esteem for the rehabilitation of people affected by brain injury from stroke. 
There is no point in doing some of the hospital care improvements if you are then condemning people to live with a life of disability,” she said.

‘My brain wasn’t working’

Ms Anson, who was a freelance writer before her stroke, told The Independent she remembered waking up in her ward in Barnstaple, after having been transferred back from Derriford hospital, unable to speak properly.

“I started to try and name everything – my brain was working, but my right arm and leg weren’t working and I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t write anything… I tried to write for my husband, but I was writing gibberish,” she said.

Ms Anson was desperate to go home and asked to leave. Her hospital physiotherapists warned her she was not ready, but doctors discharged her anyway, she said, four days after her stroke.

She was assured she would receive visits from community teams run by the Cornwall Partnership Foundation Trust, which covers the area where she lives, but when she came home, the challenges began.

“My husband came to collect me, and I had to figure out what I was going to do when I got home,” she said. “I had to get up the stairs. I was crawling up the stairs.

“It was awful, every little thing I had to do had to be thought about. When it came to brushing my teeth, I had to think about what to do with [the toothbrush].

“My husband offered me some soup, but I couldn’t eat it because of my mouth; I was just dribbling, so I just ate toast for a few days. I had no support [from the hospital] whatsoever.”

Two months passed, and Ms Anson said she still received no visit from the rehab team. In desperation, her husband John hired a private speech and language therapist – at a cost of £175 per session, meaning they could only afford a few. Eventually, the impact of the stroke and lack of aftercare impacted her mental health, sending her into “a very, very dark place”.

“My entire life was shattered. I used to be a writer. I used to write for fun, but all of that was gone; that was taken away from me. I couldn’t even go into the garden safely because I would fall, and I did fall a few times,” she said.

Eventually, the local NHS team got in contact, and she was given just four sessions of physiotherapy in December 2024, which helped her make progress in her walking, writing and speech. However, Ms Anson said since then she has had no further support.

A spokesperson from Cornwall Partnership NHS Foundation Trust said: “We know early rehabilitation at home is vital for helping people regain independence, and waiting for therapeutic support is not the experience we want for any of our patients.”

“Thanks to measures such as earlier therapy triage and additional clinic appointments and group sessions, our Integrated Community Stroke Service is seeing an improvement in referral to treatment times and the team work with partners to offer interim support wherever possible.”