Mr. Chris Macey:

What happens at the moment is that there is a care pathway for stroke that ends when people leave hospital. People are discharged and as I said in my statement, many stroke survivors feel abandoned at the hospital gates because there is no follow-up. There is no plan put in place to manage their recovery except from the likes of what we do with our patient support services. We have created a pathway where we help people make the transition home. We provide them with practical advice and information and support, programmes they might need, counselling if they require it and long-term support that otherwise has not been available to people. We need that to be funded if it is going to continue. We have long waiting lists in our programmes, unfortunately, and there are many more people we could be reaching out to who would benefit from the supports we provide. Really, if we look at any other conditions around, there tend to be at least some funded supports that are available to people. In the heart disease and stroke area, however, that whole area of psychosocial support is not really covered. If we think about it, we have talked a little bit about the psychological impact of heart disease and stroke. We know that only one stroke unit out of five has any clinical psychology. Only four out of something like 31 or 32 heart failure services have any access to clinical psychology. This is something that in very many cases creates a condition that is akin to or is PTSD, afterwards because the impact of that diagnosis on a person's life, which Ms O'Shea can obviously speak to better than me, is huge.