Acute Stroke Care in Suita City and the National Cerebral Cardiovascular Center

In Suita city (the north suburban city of metropolitan Osaka, total population of 375,000 people), acute stroke care is provided through a network of four acute hospitals. The emergency medical service (EMS) provides the urgent patient transport system with priority given to patients with suspected acute stroke brought to the nearest hospital with the appropriate diagnostic and therapeutic capacity. The NCVC is an urban comprehensive stroke center with 550 beds in Suita. The stroke service at the NCVC has a Stroke Care Unit with 18 beds managed by a multidisciplinary team of vascular neurologists, neurosurgeons, and neurointerventionalists. More than 1,000 patients with acute stroke/transient ischemic attack are hospitalized in our center every year, and roughly 150 acute reperfusion treatments including 70 mechanical thrombectomies are performed. The number of hospitalized patients in 2019 was 690 for ischemic stroke, 204 for intracranial hemorrhage, 55 for subarachnoid hemorrhage, and 70 for transient ischemic attack.