Stroke: Aftercare

Joy Morrissey Excerpts

Wednesday 21st April 2021 Westminster Hall

[Joy Morrissey (Beaconsfield) (Con)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill) for securing the debate and you, Sir Edward, for allowing me to speak. Many hon. Members have spoken so eloquently about the problems of rehabilitation and post-stroke care. I must declare an interest: a close family member had a severe stroke over the last lockdown, and I can only describe the post-rehabilitation care as a hell that I would not wish on anyone. As an educated person, I understand the pathways—we have someone there to advocate full time for this person who has had a severe and debilitating stroke—the care pathways out of hospital, however, are broken.

I cannot praise enough the wonderful doctors and the nurses—Dr Joseph Kwan is an excellent stroke specialist—and I cannot say enough good things about the hospital care we now receive through the NHS and privately; it is wonderful. However, it breaks down in rehabilitation—the post-stroke care. As any doctor, OT or speech and language therapist will say, it is how intensive the rehabilitation efforts are in those crucial months after a stroke that will determine the outcome and recovery. In those first six months, a stroke patient will need intensive speech and language OT, physical therapy and perhaps the recovery of basic skills, depending on the severity of the stroke, but it breaks down as we simply do not have the workforce capacity to manage the needs of our population. It is not the fault of anyone. It is simply that we do not have the skillset at our disposal.

Will the Minister consider meeting me and a Department for Education representative to see whether we can have a strategic recruitment drive, perhaps starting in secondary schools, to encourage young people to go into professions such as occupational therapy, physical therapy and speech and language therapy or to become a district nurse, psychologist or neuro physical therapist? We need that specialist support in so many things, but we simply do not have the qualifications or the workforce available, and yet we have young people interested in science and interested in helping in their local community. What better way, as we are restructuring and bringing new changes to the NHS, to incorporate a recruitment drive that would allow young people to enter these specialist professions? We desperately need people in those professions, to help make the difference between someone dying a terrible and painful death in their home and having the additional support they need for a recovery to make their life liveable.

I praise and pay tribute to all the silent carers of covid, who have been helping their loved ones who have suffered a stroke, and who have had to negotiate through the care pathways alone. I thank them for everything they have done. I thank all the carers and health professionals who have done everything they possibly can during covid to help those who have been suffering in silence in their homes, in out-of-hospital care.

I ask that we look at strategic, long-term recruitment for these professions to meet the needs and demands of England, and that we look at how we can develop a much more joined-up and cohesive post-stroke recovery plan, because where the process also breaks down is where someone who is in a hospital in a local authority is discharged into another local authority, where the care pathway has to pass from one council to another and from one NHS trust to another. It is very difficult to maintain a pathway that delivers and communicates that, even to your GP, so those complex pathways tend to break down at the rehabilitation level. I ask that we look at having a stroke passport that those who have recovered might take with them—a physical copy that they can take to any healthcare professional, so that they can see their records and so that there is a clear understanding of where that survivor has come from. That would ease and speed the process of recovery as new carers take on the rehabilitation of that survivor.

I thank hon. Members for being here today and for considering the complex nature of the debate. I hope that we start an all-party parliamentary group—I would have to join as well—to continue raising this important issue in the House.