Caregiving for stroke patients is a massive undertaking for any family member. The complexity of the condition coupled with limited time resources and overall stress. An IRB-approved validation trial at the Ida-Viru Central Hospital in Estonia focused on empowering caregivers to deliver effective nursing and rehabilitation protocols in the home setting via a novel digital support interface and showed significant improvements in reducing caregiver stress burden.
The 100th Annual Conference of the American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine #acrm2023 provided some unique perspectives on where rehabilitation research and solutions are heading.
CoNurse was highlighted in connection with recently completed research on “Nursing -Based Educational and Digital -Assisted Support for Severe Ischemic Stroke Patients’ caregivers”, co-authored by Katrin Põld, Evelin Kruusalu, Karmen Markov and Jekaterina Tolmacheva. This IRB-approved #RCT study was carried out within the stroke patient pathway project funded by Tervisekassa (Estonian Health Insurance Fund) and study participants patients recruited at Ida-Viru Central Hospital.
Some quick take-aways from the conference:
– multidisciplinary therapy is gaining more attention and yielding better results;
– intensive physical therapy, aphasia treatments ( SpeakTX ) and caregiver empowermentare all contributing to better clinical outcomes;
– stroke trials continue to suffer from low numbers in participants affecting both significant relevance and increased proportional variance;
– clear RoI from caregiver empowerment can be demonstrated for health systems;
– ACRM | American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine task forces and networking groups are an excellent resource to get involved and contribute to a good cause!
