UK Stroke Forum 2019
In December 2019, the Translational Neuropsychology Group travelled to Telford for the 14th annual UK Stroke Forum, hosted at the Telford International Centre. The UK Stroke Forum is a multidisciplinary conference for any stroke care professional. There was a mix of practicing clinicians, occupational therapists, physiotherapists, doctors, researchers, and also stroke survivors and their families. This unique mixture of those involved in stroke care enabled us to focus our efforts on disseminating information related to our new and improved cognitive screening tools. Thanks to the efforts of our Research Coordinator Romina Basting we were able to coordinate the group’s efforts through three intense days of talks, training workshops, demonstrations, and networking.
Talks and Demonstrations
On the first day, Prof. Nele Demeyere & Dr Kathleen Vancleef ran two back to back interactive workshops for over 200 attendees as part of the clinical training stream hosted by Dr Charlie Chung (Stroke Specialist Occupational Therapist), to explain the how, what and why of the Oxford Cognitive Screen (OCS) for screening post-stroke cognitive impairment.
Another talk by Prof. Nele Demeyere was our most anticipated, where we launched the OCS-Plus. The OCS-Plus is a stand-alone computer-tablet based extension of the OCS which screens for milder cognitive impairments, teasing out subtle impairments which are missed by gross level cognitive screens. As expected, this talk garnered much interest from the attendees and our stall was flooded with interested clinicians. Sam Webb was kept busy for the bulk of the Stroke Forum, where he demonstrated the OCS-Plus in action to many interested groups. Through sign-up sheets we were able to see just how many clinicians and clinical groups are interested in running the OCS-Plus in their own settings. We are currently only able to set up research collaborations, but will be keeping everyone posted on when the tests will be available clinically.
Posters
Both of our DPhil Students, Elise Milosevich and Margaret Moore presented on their latest projects, as well our Postdoctoral research fellow Dr Kathleen Vancleef and our Research Assistant Sam Webb. During 3 minute-slot poster tours our group were able to test our quick dissemination skills by running groups through our projects from start to finish. It was an excellent opportunity to show stroke care professionals what our research group does and how our individual projects are merging to improve current clinical practice regarding screening for impairments.
Sam Webb presented our ongoing norming and validation study of the COMPASS tool, his poster is uploaded here. Prof. Nele Demeyere presented the poster for our newly launched OCS-Plus app, including healthy normative data and validation information, the poster is accessible here. All other posters were logged in the UK Stroke Forum 2019 app and journal indexed.