SCORE Stroke Community Rehabilitation for the East

Stroke Community Rehabilitation, in short SCORE is a community engagement initiative with PERKIM as industrial partner aimed at transforming and scaling up an "ailing" community centre through Knowledge Transfer from academia to community. SCORE success in Kuala Lumpur prompted PERKIM to expand the project to other states in Malaysia, namely Kelantan. This project started with a study to provide baseline data to do a situational analysis before measuring impact after a rehabilitation centre is set up in Kota Bharu. An initial literature review is done on (1) stroke awareness, (2) community- based rehabilitation and (3) public views on rehabilitation. A questionnaire and an interview guide were constructed based on the literature review. The content and relevancy of the questionnaire was validated and piloted at UMMC and Kuala Pilah district. Data collection was done in August 2019 with the questionnaire distributed in Hospital Raja Perempuan Zainab II (HRPZ) and HUSM. In depth interview was conducted among healthcare providers at HRPZ. Issues highlighted were patients’ financial constrain, patients’ difficulty to come for rehabilitation due to lack of transportation and parking problem, patients’ poor psychological state, limited hospital capacity and patients’ lack of awareness regarding stroke rehabilitation. It is important to overcome these identified issues and challenges to improve patients’ compliance towards rehabilitation. It was also identified that customising the SCORE team to Kelantan to meet the needs of the local patients is important, which includes a complete rehabilitation team (consisting of rehabilitation physicians, nurses, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, speech therapists, support groups, counsellors, traditional medicine especially massage and acupuncture), educational and community engagement program. Therefore, concurrently community engagement programs were done in July, August, and November 2019 in collaboration with Yayasan Orang Kurang Upaya Kelantan (YOKUK) and HRPZ to educate the community about stroke, stroke risk factors and exercise for stroke patients at home.

Project information

Project Execution: 12 months
Location: Kota Bharu, Kelantan 
Contributions from industries: RM 3,700
Numbers of Community benifited: 300 people