FAST Stroke - Stop Look Listen

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Home » Guides & News » FAST Stroke – Stop Look Listen

Hi, everybody, in today’s Stop Look Listen, I’m going to be talking about strokes and the signs and symptoms that you can look out for and maybe what to do if you think somebody is having one.

Now these stand for, you know, strokes, mini strokes, TIA, which is a transient ischaemic attack. So, there are a number of different symptoms that you may see, you may see that somebody has suddenly weakness down one side of their body, that can be face, arms, legs, hands, feet.

It could be that they suddenly have loss of sight or blurred vision in one or both eyes, a severe, sudden headache, it’s also things like memory loss, disorientation, confusion, maybe an unexpected fall.

So the Stroke Association have put together a system based upon the acronym of FAST, which is really good to help you to sort of follow the process to know and maybe understand if somebody is having a stroke.

So, the first thing, is the F for the facial weakness. So that’ll probably be one side of the face, there’ll suddenly be very marked facial weakness, and I’m going to show an example, it’s obviously, there wouldn’t usually be a hand doing this, but just as an example, the eye would be drooping, and the mouth would be drooping as well, so the face would start to look, kind of, like that, as best as I can do it in this kind of a situation.

The A stands for arms, so the arm weakness. So, can they raise both their arms up, keep them there without anything dropping, without needing support, can they do that without any kind of intervention at all? And that’s really important.

The next one is S for speech. Are they having any kind of slurred speech? Now maybe see if they can let you know what their name is, just random little facts about themselves, and see whether or not you think their speech patterns aren’t necessarily what they are usually. And if it’s someone you don’t know, maybe err on the side of caution and just assume that they usually don’t speak with a slur.

And at that point, you want to go onto the T, which is to act now and it’s time to call 999. And they always say to remember to learn it, and you could save a life.

So just to remember, look out for the FAST symptoms.

Categories: Stroke, TIA

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