Sandy Lake a leader in stroke education

Health-care professionals focused on stroke prevention in northwestern Ontario point to the Sandy Lake First Nation (population: 2,650) as one of the most progressive First Nation communities in the region.

All the community needed was a helping hand from Denise Taylor, a physiotherapist at St. Joseph's Care Group. During a visit to Sandy Lake, community leaders told Taylor they needed to learn more about stroke, so when the Ministry of Health Promotion issued a call for stroke prevention proposals, she asked members of the community's health authority if they were interested and she  helped to facilitate the application.

The Sandy Lake stroke prevention program was focused from the start on providing the community with the training and resources required to keep it going into the future. The program provided training to certify two fitness instructors and two facilitators to lead stroke prevention workshops.

"Everything that happens in the Sandy Lake stroke prevention program is done by the people of Sandy Lake for the people of Sandy Lake," said Taylor. "That's what makes it sustainable because it's not sustainable for me to fly up every month to deliver a bunch of classes and then fly home. That works if the money is there, but it's $1,000 every time I fly up there."

Members of the community participating in the stroke prevention program meet twice per week for exercise classes and attend a workshop once a month.


Radio

The program uses posters and the community radio station to spread the word.

"Every week, the radio station has a health talk and once a month, the focus is on stroke," said Taylor. "They talk about the exercise classes and risk factors and engage listeners by, for example, offering prizes for the first 10 people who call in and correctly identify the five symptoms of stroke."

The community radio station in Sandy Lake and other communities is an ideal means of educating the community about the risk factors of stroke, said Taylor.

"If your child is sick at school and they want you to come pick him up, they don't call you - they announce it on the radio. Everybody listens to the radio.

It truly is the lifeline of the community."

Sandy Lake's location on the Manitoba border, 600 kilometres northwest of Thunder Bay, makes stroke prevention and stroke education critical because of the difficulty of transporting a stroke patient to Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre within the four and a half window necessary to have a CT scan and receive Tissue Plasma Activator, the clot-busting drug administered to patients who have had an ischemic stroke.

One stroke patient Taylor knows of took 24 hours to reach Thunder Bay. "It took a four hour boat ride just to get to a nursing station. From there, the patient was flown by air ambulance to Sioux Lookout and then on to Thunder Bay."

Education about the risk factors associated with stroke is important in a community like Sandy Lake because, "genetically, First Nation people are at a higher risk for stroke and when you add all of the other health determinants, the risk just skyrockets."


www.sandylake.firstnation.ca