Case study: ‘Stroke meant I could do nothing for myself’
There are only three early supported discharge teams in the country looking after patients in four hospitals. The Mater Hospital in Dublin, where Gerry was treated, is one of them.
“I know I was very lucky to have had an early discharge team to help me recover. I know such teams are not available over the country and they should be,” he says.
“I benefited fantastically from being at home surrounded by family and friends. it was my motivation to recover.”
Gerry, 59, a married father of two grown-up children from Dublin, was in bed in June 2014 when he suffered a stroke.
“It just came out of the blue,” he said. He woke up and found he could not use his arm to pick up his mobile phone but he did not think it was anything serious and went back to sleep.
When he got up to go to work he noticed that his arm was still not working properly. He had no power in it. He had also lost the ability to move his right leg.
Gerry called his GP who went out to his house and examined him before arranging for him to be taken to the Mater Hospital where he was treated for about two weeks.
“Because my leg was gone, I was in a wheelchair and had to be brought back and forth to the bathroom. That was very shocking for me,” he says.
After he went home, the hospital’s early discharge team called out to him three times a week over an eight-week period.
A physiotherapist and occupational therapists spent up to one-and-a-half hours with him at a time and set him tasks and exercises to follow after they left.
“They helped me learn all the things that most people take for granted, like lifting a cup and using a knife and fork,” said Gerry, who works in the printing trade.
“After eight weeks I could nearly do all the things that I could not do after the stroke.”
Gerry continued working at the tasks set for him by the team after they stopped visiting him at home.
“I just worked and worked at getting back to where I was before the stroke. Looking at me now, you would think that I never had a stroke.
“If I had any problem I could just telephone a team member and they would call out to me and help me deal with it.”
Gerry believes he might have recovered all right with a hospital-based treatment plan but felt it would have taken much longer.
“My stroke might not have been as severe as other people’s but it was for me. It meant I could do nothing for myself. I made tremendous progress with the team. I knew they were always there for me,” he says.
Early-supported discharge is a mechanism by which people can receive the rehabilitation they would get in hospital at home. Stroke patients receive rehabilitation three or four times a week in hospital but may have to wait six weeks to see a physiotherapist after being discharged.
