New Study Designs Personalized Support System for Stroke Patients Returning Home
Researchers across three European countries are developing a network-based intervention to help older stroke survivors manage recovery at home more effectively. The approach recognizes that current hospital-to-home transitions often leave patients without adequate support, suggesting a significant gap in care that could affect both patient outcomes and healthcare costs.
Originaltitel: Enhancing Quality of Life for Individuals with Stroke (EQL): a study protocol for co-creating a social support and context-informed intervention to improve self-management, health and well-being in older adults recovering at home
<p><strong>Introduction: </strong>Enhancing Quality of Life for Individuals with Stroke (EQL-stroke) is an international, collaborative multiphase project aiming to strengthen supported self-management for older adults recovering from stroke at home in Sweden, Latvia and the Netherlands. Existing poststroke pathways may provide insufficient support for self-management during the transition from hospital to home, and there is limited evidence on interventions that integrate social networks and everyday environmental context.</p><p><strong>Methods and analysis:</strong> EQL-stroke uses a participatory, multimethod design across three phases. Phase I generates knowledge through policy review, qualitative interviews and people-place mapping (~25 participants per country) and includes cross-cultural adaptation of the Collective Efficacy of Networks Scale. Phase II co-designs and specifies a tailored social network-informed supported self-management intervention (the Network-Based Intervention), including core components and principles for local adaptation (~15 participants per country). Phase III will recruit approximately 20-40 stroke survivors for a single-arm pilot feasibility study with an 8-week follow-up and embedded process evaluation to assess feasibility, acceptability and fidelity in routine practice.</p><p><strong>Ethics and dissemination:</strong> Ethical approval has been obtained from the Swedish Ethical Review Authority (reg. no. 2025-00083-01), the Rīgas Stradiņa Universitāte Research Ethical Committee (reg. no. Rīgas Stradiņa Universitāte Research Ethical Committee) and the Research Ethics Committee of the Faculty of Spatial Sciences, University of Groningen (reg. no. 2025-07). Findings will be disseminated through peer-reviewed publications, stakeholder engagement activities and patient/public channels.</p>