Cerebral palsy (CP) is the most common cause of physical disability among children. Teams of health professionals such as physiotherapists, paediatricians and occupational therapists provide co-ordinated services to children with CP. However, about 80% of people with CP live to at least 60 years of age, meaning that most people with CP in Ireland are adults. Adults with CP often experience health problems and are not able to access the health services they need.
This project will develop a method of creating a map of health services for adults with CP in Ireland. We will do this by making a survey that asks people with CP and health professionals, such as physiotherapists, to tell us about the health services they know of. We will ask 20 people with CP and 20 health professionals to complete the survey and give us feedback on how we can improve it. We will gather information about services from the survey and check the details against information available online. We will then create an interactive map of the services for adults with CP that we identified. We will review the findings from this study and use them to improve our method of collecting information about health services. We will use the improved method in a future study to collect information about services available to adults with CP across Ireland. We will update the interactive map with information about these services and share the map with people with CP on a website.
