community rehabilitation.

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The value of effective community rehabilitation is frequently overlooked. Patients in need of physiotherapy in the community are often unable to travel the great distances from home to clinics for input, or the trained therapists simply don’t exist.

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Severely disabled children living in rural Kenya are urgently in need of physiotherapy, to help them avoid irreversible injury from contracted and contorted limbs. In worst cases this can lead to pressure damage, tissue breakdown, infections and death. Children are left in unimaginable pain and discomfort on a daily basis because of a lack of trained therapists.

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Eating Stones Fund are working with a Kenyan team based in the rural west of the country to help increase their physiotherapy capacity, enable them to travel to patients more effectively and to train family carers so that they can help with the daily needs of their children. This training and education is vital in order to remove reliance on what is often inconsistent input and to empower families to manage their needs.

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In the case of traumatic injuries this support and education can often be the difference between someone being able to return to work and not and therefore can greatly impact a family’s ability to support themselves. The trickle-down effect of a road traffic accident or simple slip, trip or fall, in Kenya can be devastating for a family and can condemn children to unimaginably hard lives, often having to leave school at young ages to become the main bread-winner.

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If you are a physiotherapist or occupational therapist who would like to know more about our community rehabilitation team and to find out how you can help, please get in touch. We would be especially interested to hear from you if you have a physiotherapy background in paediatric, neurology, disability and chronic conditions or physiotherapy education.