Your new experience awaits. Try the new design now and help us make it even better

PERSPECTIVE article

Front. Stroke

Sec. Preventative Health and Stroke Complications

Volume 4 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fstro.2025.1599649

This article is part of the Research TopicStroke Realities in Africa: Challenges and SolutionsView all 7 articles

International Accreditation for Acute Stroke Care: Lessons Learnt from a Kenyan Stroke Centre

Provisionally accepted
  • Aga Khan University (Kenya), Nairobi, Kenya

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

Background: The prevalence of stroke is increasing in Africa, yet resources remain limited in managing the disease. Whilst there are international guidelines on how to set up and manage stroke services, even in resource-limited settings, the uptake remains low. We describe here the opportunities and challenges we faced whilst setting up a stroke care pathway of international standards in a regional referral hospital in East Africa.Methods: We describe how we adapted international stroke care guidelines for acute primary stroke (including both ischaemic and haemorrhagic stroke), and used these to inform our stroke care pathway. We highlight opportunities of leveraging on multi-disciplinary involvement, as well as challenges of implementing the pathway.Results: our hospital was accredited by the Joint Commission International with a Clinical Care Programme Certification in May 2021. However, there were strategic improvement plans recommended that needed to be addressed for future re-accreditations, including having a dedicated stroke unit and addressing shortfalls in thrombolysis and thrombectomy timelines.We discuss the challenges faced with these and other relevant findings from the accreditation process.Conclusion: international accreditation of our hospital provides an example of how to adapt international guidelines to local contexts. The description of our experience may be useful for other healthcare institutions from resource-limited settings who strive to improve the quality of stroke care they provide.

Keywords: Stroke, Care pathway, low resource settings, Subsaharan Africa, ischaemic stroke, haemorrhagic stroke

Received: 25 Mar 2025; Accepted: 18 Jul 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 Sokhi. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Dilraj Singh Sokhi, Aga Khan University (Kenya), Nairobi, Kenya

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.