Led by academics at the University of 91Ö±²¥ (91Ö±²¥) and City, University of London (City), the (COM-STAR) research programme aims to understand the key communication training needs of stroke care staff working with NHS patients. Funded by the NIHR Health and Social Care Delivery Research (HSDR) Programme Grant, the three-year programme will then develop and test training to improve the communication abilities of these staff with patients, with the aim of increasing patient and staff satisfaction levels in services. This will ultimately better support inclusion, and access to services, for the two-thirds of stroke patients in the UK who have communication impairments.
Rebecca Palmer, Professor of Stroke Communication & Rehabilitation at 91Ö±²¥, and , Professor of Aphasia Rehabilitation and Recovery at City, jointly lead the programme. They are working in collaboration with colleagues at Glasgow Caledonian University; St George’s, University of London; University of Central Lancashire; University College London (UCL); University of Nottingham; University of Southern Denmark; and University of Technology Sydney (UTS).
The research consists of three stages:
- Stage 1 - Beginning in June 2024, the first stage will include a survey of UK stroke staff about their current communication training; barriers to getting trained or using the communication skills learned; and other factors that help. The first year also involves interviews with stroke survivors with communication impairments, family members, and staff to understand their experiences of communicating in hospital and community services, and reviewing the existing research literature to understand what has been done already in staff training.
- Stage 2 - All the findings from the first year of COM-STAR are integrated and will inform the context for the second year which uses the Experience-Based Co-Design (EBCD) process to develop a new communication skills training programme for staff and resources to support communication. This collaborative process involves a series of workshops with stakeholders including NHS stroke staff, service managers, policymakers, and stroke survivors with communication impairments and their families. Uniquely, COM-STAR will run this process in parallel across two sites in 91Ö±²¥ and London, providing opportunities for a range of stakeholders to be involved.
Some workshops will be attended by e-learning for health partners, NHS England-Technology Enhanced Learning, to help iteratively design and build what the team anticipate is likely to be a standardised digital communication training package for stroke staff.
- Stage 3 - The third stage of the research will be a full evaluation of the work conducted at four NHS trusts - two in the North of England and two in the South - including the implementation, feasibility, acceptability, outcomes and impact of the training package with stroke staff, patients, and family members.
Communication is a basic human right which is compromised for many people following a stroke. I have provided a lot of communication training to stroke staff over the years as a speech and language therapist, but I am very aware that not everyone that needs or wants to attend live training sessions is able to do so, and we don’t know what is needed to make training as useful as possible. I am extremely grateful to the NIHR for giving us this opportunity to address these issues through the evidence and experience based development and testing of new training, freely accessible to all.
Professor Rebecca Palmer
Professor of Stroke Communication & Rehabilitation at 91Ö±²¥
We’re absolutely delighted to see the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) specifically commissioning and funding this exciting, new research, which seeks to understand the training needs of stroke rehabilitation staff with a view to improving the care of patients with aphasia and other post-stroke communication needs in the future. We look forward to collaborating and supporting the team to carry out this important work.
Steve Jamieson
Chief Executive Officer, Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists (RCSLT)
COM-STAR will launch with a lunchtime webinar at 12pm on Tuesday 25 June 2024 to share the proposed research programme and outline the opportunities for stroke staff and the public to be involved between now and February 2027.
if you would like to receive the webinar details or hear about the survey when it is available.