With 38 so-called “Stroke Units” for the acute treatment of stroke patients, Austria is among the international leaders. But apart from that, more than one million Austrians with neurological diseases are affected by significant care deficits: too few neurologists and far too little hospital capacity, according to the current Austrian Neurology Report 2022.
Neurological diseases are therefore among the most common serious diseases. Around one million Austrians are affected by recurring migraine attacks alone. Every year, around 26,000 people suffer a potentially life-threatening stroke or one that often causes long-term damage. Alzheimer’s/dementia (150,000 people affected), Parkinson’s disease (around 20,000 patients), epilepsy (around 80,000 people affected) and multiple sclerosis (around 14,000 patients) are other common neurological problems.
Big challenge
“If you look at diseases after the subsequent disability, then neurological diseases come first. They are the main driver for disease-related disabilities!”, says the report with a foreword by Thomas Berger, President of the Austrian Society for Neurology. “Diseases of the brain must therefore be considered one of the greatest health challenges of the 21st century. In industrialized nations in particular, they have already overtaken all other health problems,” say the authors of the Neurology Report.
In Austria, these problems are offset by significant deficiencies in the health system: 70 percent of all neurologists in private practice practice as private or private doctors. The second deficit relates to the capacities of neurological departments in hospitals. The majority of patients with neurological diseases apparently never come to such a specialist department. “There is still too little inpatient capacity in Austria to actually be able to treat all patients with neurological diseases in neurological departments,” the authors of the report state.
Source: Nachrichten
