Stroke is a time-critical emergency requiring rapid access to reperfusion therapy. In Central Australia, the pre-hospital stroke pathway is uniquely complex, involving vast distances, multimodal transport, and multiple clinical handovers across primary care, retrieval coordination, and hospital services — fragmenting care and complicating data capture.
We applied Value-Focused Process Engineering (VFPE), integrating Value-Focused Thinking (VFT) with Event-Driven Process Chain (EPC) modelling, to map the remote stroke retrieval pathway for patients presenting to Alice Springs Hospital. Developed collaboratively with frontline clinicians and statisticians, the model balances clinical detail with practical utility — avoiding both oversimplification and excessive complexity.
The resulting workflow enables systematic identification of data variables for a retrospective audit of pre-hospital time metrics, and provides a foundation for quality improvement initiatives, future research in mobile brain imaging and remote triage, and adaptation to other remote retrieval contexts.