Shirley Desmond

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Tom (ARNI Trust) for the two days practical training I undertook for stroke rehabilitation. Tom has created and developed unique tailored training techniques that provide the individual stroke survivor with essential coping strategies, regaining the use of stroke-impaired limbs and establishing ongoing exercise programs to help retrain their newly learned skills.

The ARNI Trust can offer stroke survivors new goals, set new programmes and explore new challenges, as well as offering the motivation and support they need to believe they can become more functionally independent. The unique techniques, involving balancing safety against a gradual return to normality, allows the stroke survivor to begin to apprehend how they can take more responsibility for their own recovery. It also encourages working at home, allowing simple techniques to be incorporated into daily activities. Such techniques includes learning to cope with falls, getting down to and up from the floor, turning 90 and 180 degrees quickly and safely and tailored stretching and strengthening exercises........to name a few. It was immensely enjoyable to observe Tom educating clients about the potential they have, and then encouraging them to reach out to achieve goals that otherwise they might have thought impossible.

Tom has certainly altered my career direction, and I have now taken a key interest in neurology, particularly the issues arising from those suffered from a stroke. The importance of an ongoing rehabilitation plan in patients’ lives has become apparent to me, from learning from a stroke survivor himself, and has really assured me that I too can make a difference in people’s lives.

Having studied for three extensive years at Middlesex University (Sports Rehabilitation & Injury Prevention), I feel that there is little comparison to the training specific to stroke rehabilitation, which I received from Tom. I would highly recommend the course to physiotherapists, sport rehabilitators or other medical professionals as it will provide additional tools for an effective rehabilitation from neurological injury. I honestly feel that this training is delivered in such an efficient way, because of Tom’s own experience of having a stroke himself, and his compassion and motivation to deliver treatment to stroke survivors is a credit to the ARNI Trust.

I would like to convey my thanks to Tom for allowing me the opportunity to learn from him personally. The two days were extremely rewarding and productive, and I feel that the new techniques I was taught are very valuable, because there are no other available sources that can demonstrate how to do these techniques. I am looking forward to further training with ARNI, as I feel currently they provide the most effective training techniques to return a stroke survivor to their full potential.