Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, if he will institute a campaign to raise public awareness of the symptoms of a transient ischaemic attack and the need for urgent treatment; and if he will make a statement.

There are no plans for any specific marketing activity around raising public awareness of transient ischaemic attacks (TIAs).

However, Public Health England continues to run the highly impactful Act FAST stroke awareness campaign that covers very similar signs with a message to call 999 if these signs are witnessed. Two new television executions ran in March 2014 with plans to run them again later in the current financial year.

NHS England produced a resource for clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) to support them in setting and delivering on a level of ambition to reduce premature mortality. The resource included information on high-impact interventions that CCGs could consider commissioning to reduce premature mortality. One of these is to increase the proportion of patients with TIA treated within 24 hours from 71% to 100%.

The resource is available here:

www.england.nhs.uk/ourwork/sop/red-prem-mort/