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Goal Planning at NSIC
The rehabilitation process involves you and your team setting goals to help you learn, adjust and manage any long-term changes successfully, with support being provided along the way.
Goal planning is a way of assessing and meeting your individual needs and setting goals with you. It helps you to leave us with the resources and confidence to cope with a new or adapted home, if needed, and live well in the long term. This leaflet aims to help you understand more about your rehabilitation and gain a sense of control.
Who and what is involved in Goal Planning? (2:40)
First, we assess your needs together using the Needs Assessment Checklist. This helps you and the team to understand your priorities, set rehabilitation goals at the right level for you and involve you in making decisions. The assessment looks at what you know about your body and how to look after it after a SCI, what you can do and what you need to learn to do again. It helps to ensure that your rehabilitation programme is geared towards your individual needs, building on the strengths you have and the things that are important to you.
What happens? (0:05)
First, you will complete the Stoke Mandeville Spinal Needs Assessment Checklist (SMS-NAC) with your Keyworker or named nurse. The SMS-NAC is a measure of your knowledge and understanding of spinal cord injury and the progress you have made. At the beginning of your rehabilitation, your knowledge will understandably be limited but the SMS-NAC helps us guide rehabilitation around your needs.
What does your keyworker do?
Your Keyworker is a member of the team, they might also be your Physiotherapist, OT, Case Manager, Nurse or Clinical Psychologist. In the Keyworker role they will:
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Support you to understand the needs you now have after your spinal cord injury
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Give you information and advocate on your behalf
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Coordinate and oversee your rehabilitation
What do patient think? (4:36)
The goal planning and needs assessment process was designed over the last 30 years at our centre and is used across the world.
“I feel goal planning is a very empowering part of my rehabilitation. Through careful planning, it showed me I could do things that I did not think were possible” - NSIC Patient
“I think my biggest personal achievement has been in my bladder and bowel care, where I have been able to make a great deal of progress, leaving the centre without a catheter and with full control. When that last piece of the puzzle fell into place, I was really proud of myself.” - NSIC Patient
“Initially it’s quite daunting, and you’re quite scared. You don’t really know what you need to do, and the staff help you to understand… Even things like understanding bladder problems and bowel problems, which you never even thought of being long term problems, the staff help you to understand that and manoeuvre your way through the system.” - NSIC Patient