Stoke Mandeville Hospital

Um, Lucy, can you tell me what life was like for more than a, a decade after you started having support workers to assist you?

So, um, I'm 38, and when I was 18 I had a sailing accident and I spent, uh, nine months at the National Spinal Injury Centre at Stoke Mandeville Hospital.

And when I was discharged from there, I went home with 24-hour, uh, care and, um, that has looked after me for the last 20 years, uh, but also really enabled me to live and to sort of build a career.

And I was very conscious at the start of that journey that I received so much support from other people and institutions that I also really wanted to give back.

Um, and so I have made the most of my time.

I think one of the first things I did was I worked with a spinal unit in Bangladesh, um, and we built a peer support carer training out there to improve life expectancy and quality of life there and have so far trained about 500 people.

Um, [lips smack] I have worked at Stoke Mandeville Hospital myself, supporting, uh, in, or in the patient education department, um, supporting patients to really be experts in looking after themselves or being able to direct their care so that they are verbally independent and able to, to live, um, in the way they want to.

And then, uh, from all the things I've learned, I've been talking at conferences around the world, um, you know, Korea and Malaysia and lots of different places and, you know, really I think contributed to-