Listen is jointly led by Bridges Founder, Professor Fiona Jones of Kingston University and St George’s, University of London, and Professor Monica Busse of Cardiff University. The Listen project aims to work in partnership with individuals living with long Covid and to co-design, co-deliver, and evaluate a personalised self-management support intervention with a specific focus on non-hospitalised people living with long Covid. Bridges will be playing a key role in the co-design stages as well as delivering training to all the participating rehabilitation teams. As ever we will be co-delivering the sessions with people living with long Covid. For the first time we are working in partnership with our colleagues at Diversity and Ability to help ensure the co-design and evaluation is inclusive for people from across all communities. As the project reaches key milestones, findings and developments will be shared widely and feedback invited from the broader ‘long Covid’ community. In the meantime, all the latest project news will be posted on the LISTEN twitter page @TheLISTENproj Please see the link to our blog below for more about the Listen project https://www.bridgesselfmanagement.org.uk/high-time-to-listen/

Funded by the The Health Foundation

Run by Heart n Soul, in partnership with University of the Arts London’s Creative Computing Institute and the Royal Borough of Greenwich.

Aimed to demonstrate how artificial intelligence (AI) could improve communication between people with learning disabilities and autistic people, and health and social care professionals – an area identified as a priority for change by people with learning disabilities and autistic people.
Involved the development and testing of an AI app that uses multimodal machine learning to support understanding.

Ran from November 2023 to March 2024.

Outcomes
By integrating audio, video, images, speech recognition and generative AI, the team created a multimodal analysis and communication tool. They discovered that it is possible for people with learning disabilities and autistic people to develop their own AI systems.

The exploratory app is able to simplify complex letters, change terminology so that the majority of people can understand it, describe pictures, build up an understanding of people’s preferences, and be used by people with complex needs, including physical needs, using a simple push button system.

The project also showed how communication is an effective tool to improve relationships and enable culture change; by making simple accessible communication the norm and complicated jargon-layered communication the exception, connection and relationships are better for everyone.

The study examines how telerehabilitation interventions can support the delivery of community- based rehabilitation services for stroke survivors. We aim to: a) identify factors that influence the implementation of telerehabilitation in these settings, b)capture stroke survivors', family carers' and clinicians' perspectives over the remote delivery of rehabilitation c) work together with key stakeholders to co-develop recommendations for practice. The study is funded by the Stroke Association.

. PPIE to co-design and develop the integrated living well after stroke support in Somerset
. Introduced 5 Stroke Association coordinators across the stroke pathway in Somerset to support stroke survivors and their families/carers to 'live well' and support with what matters to them
. Ongoing qualitative and quantitative data collection from the service provided, the services this project support and from those that used the service

The community neurological rehabilitation team (CNRT) in Cornwall provides domiciliary therapy for complex neurological patients. It currently has 26% of the recommended staffing with reduced efficiency due to limited clinical space and rural geography. This can result in a 6 month wait to access rehabilitation, with a therapy intensity of 1-2 sessions per month once achieved. The Cornwall Council Echo Centre is a day centre for adults with physical disabilities, accessed through local authority funding assessment which can be lengthy.
This project describes a collaboration between these system partners to successfully overcome these challenges. The aims of the project were to increase self-efficacy of participants with independent management of their long-term neurological conditions (LTNC), establish an appropriate support pathway post program and as a test of collaboration concept.
CNRT therapists trained the Echo support workers in the principals of neurological rehabilitation. 15 people with LTNC (including stroke, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s Disease, spinal cord injury and hereditary spastic paraplegia) from the CNRT caseload attended the Echo Centre weekly for 14 weeks. Goals and treatment plans were developed with the therapists, who monitored the functional activities led by the support worker staff. The North and East Integrated Care Area funded the pilot. EQ-5D-5L, long term conditions questionnaire (LTCQ), functional scales, health economic analysis (MODRUM) and stakeholder feedback were completed at 0, 14 and 26 weeks.
Thirteen participants improved their functional outcome by 5-292%. LTCQ scores improved by 71% and EQ-5D-5L by 26% on average. The therapy team were 10 times more efficient and provided 17 times the therapy intensity at 40% of the cost. Thematic analysis of focus groups demonstrated highly positive feedback from all stakeholders. Individuals on the project continue to access community groups together, two have started volunteering and one was able to reduce his care package, resulting in a £12k system cost saving. Some members of the group are now co-producing work running from the Echo centre and acting as mentors and the group continue to meet outside of Echo for regular social contact and exercise. A volunteer level 4 personal trainer who joined following BBC media coverage continues to support the Echo centre on a weekly basis.
For every £1 spent on the project, a £16 return on investment for the system was demonstrated. The total spend by the ICB was £10,500 with an overall saving of £169,849.20 to the system in the form of reduced healthcare contacts. The project demonstrated a 75% decrease in A&E contacts, 95% reduction in face-to-face GP appointments and 30% decrease in overnight stays in hospital for the cohort that attended with significant reduction in contacts with the chest clinic, Parkinson's services and day case contacts.
The project has won a further £29k funding from the ICB to run another 4 cohorts of participants over the next year. This will provide further opportunity to analyse additional impact data and develop the project in areas such as: digital technology and how this can support rehabilitation; exploring how the project can be scaled up across the system through collaboration with other partners such as STEPS or the community rehabilitation teams; and examining how specialist skills in neurological rehabilitation can be disseminated and embedded with the wide rehabilitation space.