Pilot scheme improves stroke treatment in HarrogateFell rescue responders help stroke-stricken man at Fountains AbbeyNew Harrogate ‘café’ to support communication after stroke and brain injury

A charity supporting people living with communication issues after stroke is appealing for volunteers to help run a new service in Harrogate.

Aphasia Support is setting up a twice-monthly ‘café’ at Knaresborough Road Health Centre from September.

It will offer activities including quizzes, games, and arts and crafts, while providing people with aphasia the chance to meet up and build their confidence in communicating.

While a qualified speech and language therapist will be on hand to run the café, volunteers will also be needed at the sessions, including serving drinks and cakes to visitors.

James Major, CEO of Aphasia Support, said:

“We’re delighted to be launching our sixth Aphasia Café in Yorkshire. We’ve already got sessions running twice a month in Leeds, Halifax, Wakefield, Barnsley, and Doncaster, and have since recognised a real need for similar community support in Harrogate following an increase in referrals.

“Our events are a great opportunity for those living with aphasia and their carers to meet others dealing with the same challenges, with the support of an experienced speech and language therapist. Although, as a charity, we rely on the generosity of volunteers to help run the cafes.

“So, we’re on the lookout for new faces in Harrogate to join our team. If you’re looking for a volunteer role, or if you have an interest in speech and language, we’d love to hear from you. You don’t need any speech and language experience and we provide full training.”

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Aphasia is a complex language disorder experienced by people who have had a stroke or other type of brain injury.

It affects the ability to speak, read, write and understand language.

A third of stroke survivors in the UK live with the condition, and a total of 350,000 people have aphasia, but Aphasia Support said almost 85% of the public have never heard of it.

The charity helps people with aphasia to work on key communication goals with support from speech and language therapists.

It matches patients with trained volunteers, working together on a one-to-one basis using conversation techniques and computer therapy programmes.

The first Harrogate aphasia café takes place on Thursday, September 14, from 10,30am to noon. It will run every second and fourth Thursday of the month from then on.

Pat Malin, who has volunteered at Aphasia Support’s café in Barnsley since 2021, said the experience has also been beneficial to her:

“I love seeing people grow in confidence the more they attend the café.

“I’ve made so many great friends since I started volunteering for Aphasia Support. We’re like a little family.”

Anyone interested in volunteering at the Harrogate group only needs to be available for a few hours each month. To find out more, visit Aphasia Support’s website.

Harrogate chamber chief executive David Simister seriously ill in hospital

David Simister, chief executive of Harrogate District Chamber of Commerce, is seriously ill in hospital.

The business organisation said on its website yesterday Mr Simister had suffered a “serious medical episode”.

It added:

“I am sure all our members, and friends in the wider business community of Harrogate will join us in wishing him and his family our thoughts and prayers for a positive outcome and want him to know that we will all be with him on his road to recovery.

“We are deeply saddened by the news and greatly miss David’s infectious enthusiasm and dedication.”

The message added the chamber’s management team led by president Sue Kramer and vice-presidents, Martin Mann, Sam Oakes and Jackie Snape would continue to support and represent chamber members.

Former journalist Mr Simister is well known in Harrogate. He co-founded the Harrogate communications firm Different PR and is a former councillor.

The Stray Ferret sends our best wishes to Mr Simister and hope for his speedy recovery.

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Harrogate woman who had stroke at 18 to run London marathon

A Harrogate woman who had a stroke when she was just 18 years old is running the London marathon to raise money to help others.

Millie Carrington was a healthy teenager when she suffered a stroke during a weekend job at a supermarket in Harrogate 10 years ago.

She had just finished A-levels at Harrogate Grammar School and did not imagine someone so young and healthy could be affected by such a serious condition. Millie said:

“I had many of the telltale signs – the right side of my face fell, I was weak down one side, I had issues speaking and understanding conversation.

“I vividly remember thinking to myself, ‘this feels like I’m having a stroke’. Yet due to my age, both those who witnessed it, as well as myself, didn’t think I was actually having a stroke. I instead put it down to a particularly bad migraine.

“It would take three more days of screaming headaches, trouble walking, problems speaking, writing and communicating, and constant sleeping before I went to a hospital where doctors diagnosed a blood clot in my brain. After many tests, they concluded that the cause was due to a previously undetected hole in my heart, which I later had surgery to close.”

Millie Carrington

Millie pictured a few months after her stroke.

Millie says she was “incredibly lucky” to make a full recovery after speech and occupational therapy, and heart surgery to fix the cause of the stroke.

In 2015 she and a friend hitchhiked from Edinburgh to Paris to raise money for the Stroke Association, which supports stroke survivors.

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Now she is attempting to raise £2,000 for the same organisation by completing the 26-mile route through the capital on April 23. She also wants to reach out to young people.

She said:

“I especially want to use this opportunity to raise awareness that a stroke can happen to anyone, of any age. I was very lucky to recover in full, but this doesn’t happen for a lot of people.

“Seeking medical attention in the first three hours often means the person receives crucial medication that gives them the best chance of survival and recovery.”

Millie has already raised nearly half of her £2,000 target. You can support her charity run here.

Robotic cats to provide comfort for North Yorkshire dementia patients

Knaresborough Rotary Club has delivered a ‘litter’ of 27 robotic cats to the charity Dementia Forward.

The charity, which is funded by North Yorkshire County Council, provides dementia support across the county.

During lockdown, it launched a ‘cafe in a box’ scheme in which dementia patients receive special boxes tailored to their individual interests.

Robotic cats have been included in the boxes to patients who have been clinically assessed to obtain maximum benefit from robot cat therapy.

Research has found the therapeutic value of robotic cats can be more beneficial than drugs for certain conditions.

The latest delivery takes the number of robotic cats donated by Knaresborough Rotary Club to 50.

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Each robot weighs about the same as a cat and interacts in a lifelike way, creating a calming effect.

They miaow, purr, lick their paws and can become long-term companions to dementia patients.

Jill Quinn, chief executive of Dementia Forward, said people became attached to the cats after the charity trialled them.

Jill Quinn, chief executive of Dementia Forward.

Ms Quinn said:

“They are very lifelike and purr and react when they are stroked.

“They can provide comfort for a person with dementia who is anxious or unable to settle by providing a calming effect.

“One example we witnessed was a woman who was very into arts and crafts, but her dementia meant that she would get anxious and wasn’t able to stay involved in any activity.

“But once we placed the cat on her knee she sat and stroked it – it created a calming distraction which enabled her to stay focussed and enjoy the activity.”

‘It could happen to anyone’, says Harrogate woman who had stroke at 37

At just 37-years-old, a Harrogate woman suffered a stroke that left her needing emergency surgery and permanently altered her outlook on life.

Caroline Brady is sharing her story today, on World Stroke Day, in hope of raising awareness that a stroke can happen to anyone, no matter their age.

On January 17, 2020 she was working as a fitness instructor at Harrogate’s David Lloyd gym when she began slurring her speech.

Ms Brady finished teaching her abs class but over the next two hours continued to slur and felt dizzy.

Her colleagues grew concerned and called for an ambulance. The paramedics performed a stroke assessment, which she passed, so she was taken to Harrogate District Hospital for further investigation.

Four hours after the initial signs, Ms Brady lost control of her left side and had a stroke in hospital at 1.30pm.

By 4pm she was in theatre to remove a clot on her brain. She said she remembers “a feeling of urgency” around her but it wasn’t until she came round that she understood what had just happened.

Fresh outlook on life

Since then, Ms Brady has been focused on recovery. She said she was “extremely lucky” to have recovered to the extent that she’s back at work, walking and even running.

She has returned to David Lloyd working part-time as a receptionist, but said her outlook on life has changed.

“It’s been a hard journey back to work. I was very work conscious, always picking up extra hours and covering for people but going back after the stroke I knew I couldn’t do the same.

“So I had a word with myself and said ‘you aren’t weak to slow down’. When you have such a shock at a young age, with no underlying health issues, you can’t help but think differently.”

She no longer teaches gym classes and has been advised to stop weight training but says she is happy just to be walking and occasionally running again.

Ms Brady is enjoying the outdoors again.

Following her experiences, she is determined to raise awareness of strokes and who they can affect.

She added:

“For anyone that knows me it was a huge shock, you never expect to hear ‘I’ve had a stroke’ from a young person. But it can happen to anyone.

“There’s also a misconception that if you have one at a young age you will recover well, but that’s not always the case.”

Ms Brady said she was extremely lucky to be treated so quickly. Other young stroke survivors she’s met were left for hours waiting for a diagnosis by doctors who didn’t diagnose a stroke.

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She is holding a 12-hour charity event at the gym today from 8am to 8pm. Members and staff are walking or running on a treadmill for 30 minutes at a time to raise funds for A Stroke of Luck, a charity that gives stroke survivors access to fitness professionals to help with recovery.

To donate click here.

Stroke survival figures ‘skewed by Covid,’ says NHS official

The pandemic has “significantly skewed” figures on how a major revamp of stroke services has impacted on survival rates in Harrogate, an NHS official has said.

Simon Cox, director of acute commissioning at North Yorkshire Clinical Commissioning Groups, told a meeting today that disruptions during Covid have meant the NHS is not yet able to give a full picture on the impact of changes to where critically ill stroke patients are sent for treatment.

Under the changes introduced in 2019, ambulances began taking patients to specialist units at Leeds or York hospitals rather than Harrogate after evidence showed they had a better chance of survival and not needing long-term care, even if travel times were increased.

It has meant around two thirds of the on-average 300 people who fall seriously ill with a stroke in Harrogate each year are sent to Leeds, with the other third taken to York.

Mr Cox told the Harrogate and Knaresborough Area Constituency Committee that while he would provide the full figures at a later date, he was confident the changes were taking their intended effect.

He said:

“Just as the changes were started to be embedded we had the emergence of the Covid pandemic. Nationally the numbers of patients presenting with strokes has significantly reduced – and that is potentially quite worrying.

“We absolutely can provide additional data – it just needs to be very heavily caveated as it is very difficult with the smaller numbers to make too many judgements.”

The changes follow a national review, which found larger, more specialist stroke units were better equipped to increase survival rates and improve recovery times.

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Before they came into effect, members of the Harrogate and Knaresborough Area Constituency Committee signalled their support for the move, although there were questions over the impact of increased travel times to hospital.

Speaking at today’s meeting, councillor David Goode said he was “disappointed” that the data was not provided for this and that he hoped the committee would be given a fuller picture soon.

He said:

“I fully appreciate the difficulties of operating and creating stats during the period of covid, but I am a little disappointed with the lack of evidence.

“There was general consensus that this was the right direction of travel but there were concerns around the potential impact on travel distances.

“At the time, my wife had just had a stroke and she was transferred to Leeds – the experience in the ambulance there was that there was certainly delay due to traffic volumes.”

In response, Mr Cox said there was now greater priority on getting patients to the better-equipped stroke units rather than the nearest.

He also said the main reason for the figures being skewed was because of a lower number of patients presenting with stroke symptoms – something he added was “concerning”.

He said:

“Stroke is unfortunately a relatively common and devastating condition. It is a sudden attack on the brain, either a bleed or a clot. There are an awful lot of them happening all the time across the UK.

“One of the things that has been concerning in 2020 was the lower presentations of patients.

“That was a much more significant issue in the first wave of the pandemic and it has been less so fortunately through the latter part of the year.”