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After surgery or a complex medical condition, patients can be in an acute care hospital for a very long time. Languishing in a hospital bed where your life was saved also saps your energy and strength. Even doing the simplest things, like moving on your own, dressing yourself, brushing your teeth or getting out of bed, become monumental challenges. Getting back to being your active, healthy and productive self can seem impossible.
The Short-Term Active Reconditioning (STAR) program at St. John's Rehab Hospital can change all of that. Rather than focusing on a specific disease or injury, the program helps patients who are deconditioned to regain their strength, independence and mobility following surgery or a long acute care hospital stay. This allows us to admit people who have active rehab goals, even if their conditions do not traditionally make them candidates for rehab.
In the last year, we have developed formal admission criteria for the program. We showed off our STAR power in February 2010, formally launching the program to more than 80 attendees and referring partners at the Referring to Rehab Open House. Referrals are now accepted from acute care hospitals across Ontario.
They're known as silent killers, but more and more people are surviving strokes than ever before. And although it often comes on suddenly, a stroke can affect you for the rest of your life.
Survivors need access to a rehabilitation program so that they can re-learn to talk, move their limbs, walk and all the other skills they need to return to an active life. As an expert in stroke and neurological rehabilitation, St. John's Rehab is well positioned to meet the expanded need for care in the growing, aging population.
This year, we increased our capacity so that, at any one time, we can care for 30 people recovering from strokes and neurological conditions. We didn't do this by opening more beds or adding more staff. Instead, we innovated by looking for ways to shift our limited resources. We explored referral patterns to anticipate the need. We worked with acute care hospitals to share leading practices in neurological care and to learn from their experiences. And we introduced new elements, such as small-group therapy sessions, so that patients could also support each other in their recovery.
Our specialized inpatient rehabilitation is complemented by the new All About Stroke education program. Launched in November 2010, the program teaches inpatients, their families and their caregivers how to manage the physical and emotional challenges of life after a stroke.
Participants learn how to:
Once patients return home, they have the information they need to stay active, remain healthy and keep the silent killer at bay.
Warren suffered from an invasive infection that infiltrated his bloodstream. With his blood pressure dropping and his organs failing, Warren went into septic shock. Miraculously, he survived, but he was in intensive care for seven weeks. Eight of his toes had to be amputated. His energy was depleted. He had no muscle tone and no balance to stand on his own two feet.
