Help Us Expand Our Spinal Cord Injury Centre!

Posted by Rebekah Ahmed on 20 May 2016

Every eight hours someone is told they may never walk again. It can happen in a split second and change your life forever.

At the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital (RNOH) in Stanmore, our Spinal Cord Injury Centre (SCIC) is dedicated to taking people from surgery, through rehabilitation, and back into the community.

Our SCIC treats over 2000 patients annually from across the country and is a centre of excellence providing services that local hospitals and A&E departments can't. However at present it's not big enough to meet the demand for its service and two thirds of referrals cannot be accommodated at all. Spinal cord-injured patients are being turned away and we think that's unacceptable.

The RNOH Charity is really excited to soon be launching a crowdfunding campaign to expand our SCIC. We believe that every patient with a spinal cord injury deserves the best possible care and that’s why we want to add two more patient rooms and two double bedded bays to the centre. As well as that we’ll be equipping the centre with a range of cutting edge equipment to be used for rehabilitation. We want to cut down on waiting times, admit many more patients per year than we currently can, and we also think that the expansion in resources will have a positive effect on the stress levels of patients and their families, as well as our staff. Ultimately, we want to give our patients the greatest possible chance of being able to return to a fully independent lifestyle. 

We give our patients the best possible care. As former patient Paul Rose recently said when interviewed for the RNOH website, “The support I received was immense, from the nurses on the unit to the physiotherapists in the gym, and not forgetting the rehabilitation assistants who helped me learn how to cope with the outside world from a seated position. I didn't fully appreciate what these people had given me until I left the unit and had to face the world by myself. They were always there to help and I hadn't realised how much support they really had given me.”

More information about the campaign, including how to support it, will be coming shortly so please keep checking our Facebook and Twitter for more details. We need to raise £100,000 and we can only do it with your help. 

Our SCIC rebuilds lives. An expansion will help us rebuild the lives of many more people, including quadriplegic patients, tetraplegic patients, and those whose injuries are so serious they need ventilators to breathe.