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Background: There is inconsistent evidence that patients with stroke admitted to hospital out of regular working hours (such as weekends) experience worse outcomes. We aimed to identify if inequalities in the quality of care and mortality exist in contemporary stroke care in England. Methods: SINAP is a prospective database of acute stroke patients, documenting details of processes of care over the first 72 hours. We compared quality of care indicators and mortality at 72 hours, 7 days and 30 days, for patients who arrived within normal hours (Monday–Friday 8am to 6pm) and for those who arrived out of hours, using multivariable logistic and Cox proportional hazard models. Quality of care was defined according to time from arrival at hospital to interventions (e.g., brain scan), and whether the patient received therapeutic interventions (such as thrombolysis). Results: 45,726 stroke patients were admitted to 130 hospitals in England between 1 April 2010 and 31 January 2012. Patients admitted out of hours (n = 23779) had more features indicative of worse prognosis (haemorrhagic stroke, reduced consciousness, pre stroke dependency). Out of hours admission was significantly associated with longer delays in receiving a CT scan or being admitted to a stroke unit, and reduced odds of receiving thrombolysis. After adjusting for casemix, there was no consistent evidence of higher mortality for patients admitted out of hours, but patients admitted at the weekends had a higher risk of 30 day mortality (OR 1.14, 95% CI 1.06–1.21) Conclusion: Inequalities in the provision of stroke care for people admitted out of regular hours persist in contemporary stroke in England. The association with mortality is small and largely attributable to higher illness severity in patients admitted out of hours. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Electronic patient records from primary care databases are increasingly used in public health and health services research but methods used to identify cases with disease are not well described. This study aimed to evaluate the relevance of different codes for the identification of acute stroke in a primary care database, and to evaluate trends in the use of different codes over time. Methods: Data were obtained from the General Practice Research Database from 1997 to 2006. All subjects had a minimum of 24 months of up-to-standard record before the first recorded stroke diagnosis. Initially, we identified stroke cases using a supplemented version of the set of codes for prevalent stroke used by the Office for National Statistics in Key health statistics from general practice 1998 (ONS codes). The ONS codes were then independently reviewed by four raters and a restricted set of 121 codes for 'acute stroke' was identified but the kappa statistic was low at 0.23. Results: Initial extraction of data using the ONS codes gave 48,239 cases of stroke from 1997 to 2006. Application of the restricted set of codes reduced this to 39,424 cases. There were 2,288 cases whose index medical codes were for 'stroke annual review' and 3,112 for 'stroke monitoring'. The frequency of stroke review and monitoring codes as index codes increased from 9 per year in 1997 to 1,612 in 2004, 1,530 in 2005 and 1,424 in 2006. The one year mortality of cases with the restricted set of codes was 29.1% but for 'stroke annual review,' 4.6% and for 'stroke monitoring codes', 5.7%. Conclusion: In the analysis of electronic patient records, different medical codes for a single condition may have varying clinical and prognostic significance; utilisation of different medical codes may change over time; researchers with differing clinical or epidemiological experience may have differing interpretations of the relevance of particular codes. There is a need for greater transparency in the selection of sets of codes for different conditions, for the reporting of sensitivity analyses using different sets of codes, as well as sharing of code sets among researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]