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Into the Archive - South London Stroke Register

15 October 2025

Population health is a way to understand health outcomes and disparities in a group of people. It examines how social, economic, and environmental factors impact health and identifies interventions or policies to improve health for all. Here at King’s, experts have been studying population health for over half a century. ‘Into the Archive’ aims to amplify experts, past and present, at King’s who have worked to revolutionise health and healthcare.

South London Stroke Register (SLSR) established by Emeritus Professor Charles Wolfe

The SLSR is a population-based cohort study established in 1995 to investigate the incidence, cause and outcomes of stroke in a multi-ethnic inner-city population.

Over the years, the study recruited more than 7700 people in Lambeth and Southwark who experienced a first stroke. The study followed up on the individuals long-term (for up to 15 years), with over 2750 people still taking part in 2023.

Their 2013 study highlighted that lower socioeconomic status was associated with poorer stroke outcome. Researchers also found that total stroke incidence was reduced by 39.5% during the 16-year period, however, this was not seen in Black people or people under 55 years old.

In the past few years, SLSR researchers have worked with The Policy Institute on examining how data can be harnessed to improve the lives of stroke survivors. Improvement will consider a pathway from data collection, data storage and access, to data use.

“The SLSR study is remarkable for so many reasons- it has improved service delivery, enriched research in this field, and informed policy, including the European Parliament on the burden of stroke in Europe. SLSR has expanded greatly, from utilising our expertise in data to improve lives of survivor to improving quality of care for survivors in care homes. The study has also expanded to a collaboration to improve stroke outcome in Sierra Leone.” – Professor Josip Car, Professor of Population and Digital Health Sciences in the Faculty of Life Science and Medicine and Director of King's Population Health Institute