SIA Services

We can’t control life and sometimes things happen when we don’t expect them. We go against a wall ofquestions and we would like to have somebody on the other side to take away our fears and our doubts.

This is the aim of Spinal Injuries Association in United Kingdom and we can find it clearly on its first book So you're paralysed… Because most of the times people are paralysed in consequence of serious accidents, lots of question come to people’s minds. Question they have never thought about before, but the answer suddenly become the most important thing in the world.

So, the SIA was founded in 1974 with a small staff, limited funds and very little in the way of services. It was created to meet the needs of newly spinal cord injured people and their families, for whom there seemed to be little or no information about the effects of such an injury and the prospects for living an independent life as a disabled person. In the beginning SIA had some difficulties to get funds to work… too much clients for so little staff and funds.

Anyway, nobody gave up and you can find in each year of its existence people that was part of the demand to help people with spinal injuries. Nowadays SIA is so much bigger and it has become a professional organisation. So far they have also published many other books. The last one was Sex Matters, published in November 2002.

In the beginning of the times SIA had to find a way to communicate to all people around the world, specially because the number of members was bigger year after year. What could they do? They needed to find a way to spread the information about the last developments in the world of spinal cord injury and disability in general.

Sometimes people don’t have conscience this is an immense world. If we loose one day we can loose the most important information of our lives. Every single information is important for someone who’s life is, after all, so different for others’ eyes. Because of this need, it was created SIA’s first Newsletter. It was on its very old fashion way.

Originally, this was issued four times a year and in the early days was produced on a manual typewriter, had black and white pictures glued on, was photocopied and mailed from the SIA office.of course today, they have a magazine and the product itself is much better. Anyway, all the information they have shared along the years helped thousands of people and this is more important than the way magazine looks like.

It was in 1995 when Jeffrey Green Russel decided to create SIA’s website. Information roads were
changing day after day and SIA couldn’t ignore it. Today, the website now receives in excess of 20,000
visitors per month and is one of the best Community sites in the business.

Besides internet services, there is also the Link Schemes. SIA explains it very well on its website, “SIA
recognised the value of peer support even back then, and in the early 80s decided to set up two Link
Schemes - one for sci people and another for relatives/friends. The idea was to encourage members,
relatives and/or friends to register with either one of the Schemes and agree to be contacted by others wishing to talk over matters about which they had personal knowledge.

The Schemes were operated by the Welfare Service, and although the Relatives Link Scheme has somewhat fallen by the wayside, the sci Link Scheme still exists today. It has been some time since either Scheme was updated, and plans are afoot to amalgamate them both into smaller Community Link Schemes over a period of time.”

But although last new technologies have become very important in communication, SIA never forgot the phone. The truth is that SIA has created a Welfare Service by phone which has become very important for everyone who needed to have access to specialist advice. SIA dedicated a phone line as well as personal callers to the office will specialized people on the other side to give the right answer in the right time. This Welfare Service is totally free. And there is the Helpline too. This special line is not so specialized, but all team has been trained to answer a whole range of questions and provide emotional support to those facing problems that often seem insurmountable.

What about the money? When accidents happen family find themselves fighting with the problem of having money to support a newly injured person in the hospital plus all the travels to visit him/her regularly. To help these families SIA created the Relatives Travel Found. Applications for assistance are made to SIA via hospital Social Workers, with the amount awarded being dependent on individual circumstances. Thanks to this Project fundraiser SIA has many times managed to raise sufficient funds to allow them to provide assistance for a whole year.

SIA exists for more than 30 years… you can imagine right now how much information the have collect. It had started to become difficult to organize all the information so people could easily get it. So it was
created a Library and SCI Database, “We are keen to share this information with all who can make use of it for the benefit of SCI people and have appointed a Database Librarian to work on the mammoth task of placing all this valuable information onto a SCI database. It is hoped that we shall eventually be able to make this available to GP's and General Hospitals via a CD Rom to help them support our members and others with SCI. It is also hoped that our new purpose built premises will have at its heart a state of the art library of information relating to all aspects of living with a SCI.”, these are the new aims of SIA…

The court… SIA knows that many spinal injuries occur as a result of accidents and justice is not always blind. So SIA has fought for the real rights of the victims, helping them with the information they need. It is called the Legal Claims Service. Actually, in 1991 SIA appointed a spinal cord injured Legal Claims Officer (also a qualified solicitor), whose job was to prepare expert witness reports for solicitors representing SCI people. The Legal Claims Officer also compiled a database of Solicitors with proven experience in personal injury claims to recommend to members wishing to pursue a claim. So, the Directory of Personal Injury Solicitors contains details of firms meeting SIA's criteria for inclusion, all of whom offer a free initial consultation to determine whether or not there is a case to be answered.

Once a SCI person is at home, sometimes he/she needs some kind of assistance and it is not always easy to get it from the family or from local authority service provision. Because of this reality, SIA funded the Personal Assistance Service. This service provides specially trained PA's to visit a member's home on a short-term, live-in basis and carry out tasks normally undertaken by the usual care provider.

When we ask SIA about the future… the answer looks so simple, “Hopefully, we have managed to illustrate the breadth and depth of the work carried out on behalf of spinal cord injured people since our small beginnings in 1974. However, much remains to be done and we are always looking at ways in which to improve on what we do and what we would like to do. There are several new projects in the pipeline, including Youth Development, Equally Able, Expert Patient Scheme and Elder Care. All in all, the future of SIA holds a lot of promise and with the continued support of its members can only go from strength to strength.”