Our survey says…

A big thank you to everyone who took part in our beneficiary survey this year. We received responses from 450 stroke survivors, 144 family members, friends, and carers, and 41 healthcare professionals. Your input is invaluable, and we greatly appreciate the time you took to share your thoughts.

We apologise for the delay in providing an update. With the wealth of information gathered—124 pages from stroke survivors alone—it took our small team some time to analyse everything.

Key Findings

From our survey of stroke survivors, we discovered:

80% experience post-stroke fatigue.
54% face restricted mobility.
47% have memory problems.
45% worry about having another stroke.
39% are unable to work.
33% struggle with depression.

Thanks to the support that we provide at Different Strokes:

58% have a better understanding of life after a stroke.
61% better understand the invisible aspects of stroke.
48% feel more comfortable sharing their experiences.

In terms of our services, 75% rated us as excellent or good, 20% as okay, and 5% as poor. While the feedback is largely positive, we recognise there’s more we can do as an organisation, and we’re committed to making improvements. We will be looking at how we can further develop our services going forward.

Feedback on our Facebook Group

We recognise that our Facebook support group has experienced some changes over the past year, and the response to these changes has been mixed. The group was rated as excellent or good by 67% of respondents, while 24% felt it was okay, and 9% rated it as poor.

Some members appreciated how we handled challenging situations, particularly those that required us to maintain a focus on stroke-related issues. However, others were critical of our administration team and feeling that the group should have more of a social feel to it.

In response to this feedback, we introduced a daily social post, allowing for non-stroke-related discussions without these conversations dominating the main feed. This adjustment was well-received, with 84% of stroke survivors and 86% of family, friends, and carers either supporting this change or having no objections to it.

Feedback on Exercise Sessions

We asked for your input on online exercise sessions and provided a range of options for future sessions including shorter more focused videos or longer more social online classes. The feedback received was very even across all options, with no clear preferred option. We are working on a plan for ongoing exercise now and hope to have further updates within the months to come.

Updating our Information Packs

We feel that the time is right to update our information packs and your feedback has really helped establish our priorities in this area. It was clear that many of you felt that information surrounding the invisible impact of stroke and mental health & wellbeing would be most important to you. Many thanks to everyone who said they would be happy to support us on updating these packs, and we will be reaching out to many of you about this in due course.

Future Surveys

On a final note, our survey is extremely useful to us in providing a snapshot of how you feel we are doing, both with our overall services and specific activities that we offer, and in finding out what is important to younger stroke survivors. This year, it has helped us to make decisions about our Facebook group, online exercise and info packs. But we are conscious that we could do a little better at directly linking the feedback in the survey and our future strategic plans going forward.

Therefore, as we develop a new strategy going forward, we will be giving careful consideration to how we best use surveys, and what the most effective way to gather the opinions of our community is. It’s therefore likely that we won’t be continuing the survey on an annual basis, but will conduct a major survey every few years, and holding shorter much more focused surveys on specific issues on a much more regular basis, which will allow us to be a lot more responsive to the needs and wishes of stroke survivors in our community.