This week’s blog sees the return of our conference roundup blog. This week, it’s a roundup from the UK Stroke Forum, 4-6th December 2023, Birmingham, UK.

The UK Stroke Forum is the UK’s largest multidisciplinary conference for stroke professionals. It is held each year in a UK city, and this year saw the turn of Birmingham. Although delegates are predominantly clinicians and researchers based in the UK, it also draws an international audience with delegates attending this year from Sweden, Denmark, Portugal and Ireland. This year, many people’s travel plans were thwarted by train strikes and snow storms, but that didn’t stop an impressive 2000 people registering for the event – the first year, the event has sold out completely before the start!

An event like this brings together stroke professionals and researchers to learn with and from each other, and to share ideas about how to continuously improve what we are doing to enhance outcomes and experiences for people affected by stroke and their families. Each year UK Stroke Forum showcases the latest developments in stroke care, quality improvement and service design, research and policy and this year was no exception to that. The opening session on Day 1 began with a plenary around inequities in stroke care. Within the talks, inequities in relation to cardiovascular disease prevention, provision of acute services such as thrombectomy, life after stroke and involvement of people from diverse backgrounds in stroke research were highlighted. The plenary finished with a conversation piece between Ms Juliet Bouverie, the Chief Executive of the Stroke Association and Chair of the Richmond Group of charities with Ms Ann Bamford, a person with experience of stroke herself, and Reverend Charles Kwaku-Odoi, the Chief Officer of the African and Caribbean Health Network discussing how we can do better to address the inequalities that persist in our healthcare systems. The theme of inequalities and listening to the needs of easily ignored groups continued throughout the conference with a later parallel session on stroke and ethnicity and lots of people with lived experience very kindly sharing their experiences. Collectively, these sessions put inequalities in stroke firmly on our agenda and represent a call to arms for the whole stroke community to better address the needs of people from diverse communities in the delivery of stroke care and the design and undertaking of stroke research.

As well as several sessions designed to help our multidisciplinary stroke workforce get to grips with the latest clinical guideline recommendations for therapy, there were sessions specifically for nurses who make up one of the largest delegate groups at the UK Stroke Forum. The first session, led by the Chair of the National Stroke Nursing Forum, Ms Rachel Jones, focussed on nurses’ roles in stroke and evidence generated by stroke nurses for practice. The talks highlighted the impressive research that’s been undertaken on early neurological assessment by Dr Alison McLoughlin from UCLAN as well as opportunities for clinical research roles in nursing and the importance of underpinning our nursing practice with the latest research evidence from Dr Claire Gordon (who also won the UKSF Best Poster Prize!). There were also talks from Ms Lynsey Duncan who is a Chest, Heart and Stroke Nurse in Scotland sharing insights of her role and the holistic services on offer from third sector support in local communities which inspired a lot of questions from the floor. And finally, a talk from Ms Diana Day who holds a joint clinical/research post in Cambridge and is a primary investigator for several large clinical stroke trials and talked about the importance of advanced clinical skills in stroke nursing leadership and practice. Such an impressive line-up of speakers and talks showcased the inspirational variety of roles and opportunities for stroke nurses – exciting times ahead!

The second nursing focussed session focussed on helping to build a toolkit for getting quality improvement projects off the ground Discussions focussed on how to start with building a business case for QI ideas, how to source data (and what data!) to underpin and frame it, who you need to involve and ‘get on board’ and what tools are available to support you along the way. The energy and passion in the room was palpable and the ideas that emerged were particularly exciting and inspirational showing that nurses are willing and ready to lead the way in QI developments within stroke care. Really hoping that we see some of these ideas come to fruition and showcased at next years’ conference. The joint National Stroke and Scottish Stroke Nurse Forum prize for best stroke care or research by a stroke nurse went to Dr Emmie Malewezi from Edge Hill University for her work on supporting carers’ needs which was a joy to see – and to hear her present on this earlier in the week.

The final point I’d like to mention about the conference was the amount of lived experience involvement this year. This is a step change from previous years. Although the conference is very much a health professional-focussed one, lived experience was embedded throughout the programme sessions. People affected by stroke kindly and bravely shared their experiences with us, reminding us of the things that really matter to people and urging us to keep this at the forefront of our minds at all times in our stroke care and research. What a valuable learning opportunity for us and on behalf of nursing colleagues at the conference, I’d like to say a huge thank you to everyone who joined the conference to teach us more about how we can continuously improve upon what we do.
UKSF this year felt like it had something for everyone. Nursing felt really well represented on the programme this year and there’s so many exciting opportunities for nurses to showcase their work – can’t wait to see what next years’ UKSF has in store for us nurses!

Professor Lisa Kidd is a committee member of the Scottish Stroke Nurse Forum and current Chair of the UK Stroke Forum.  This blog has been written by Lisa for Evidence Based Nursing Social and does not claim to represent the views of the wider committee or conference organisers.