The Leeds Family Placement Scheme: principles, participants and postscript

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Abstract
A follow-up survey to measure functional ability was carried out on a group of patients with acute stroke who had received community-based rehabilitation from the Leeds Family Placement Scheme for stroke patients (FPS). A previous study at one year poststroke showed that patients receiving this additional support - placed patients (n = 10) - were more likely to maintain their three- month poststroke functional ability than were patients discharged directly home (n = 61). The follow-up contacted all survivors who were living in the community at 42 months poststroke. The proportion of patients who had maintained or improved their three-month poststroke Barthel score was statistically significantly greater in the group of placed patients (n = 8) than in the group of unplaced patients (n = 48). This paper describes the principles of the FPS, which provides patient-oriented, community-based rehabilitation, and suggests that its success in producing sustained and measurable improvement in functional ability may be largely due to the opportunity it provides for consolidating skills that have been learnt during hospital-based rehabilitation and in transferring these skills to the home.