Paralysed PE teacher returns to the classroom thanks to unique and dedicated physiotherapy experts.

May 11, 2011 - PRLog -- When Darren Mitchell broke his neck in a holiday accident just hours after arriving in Spain, his physical fitness and positive outlook seemingly helped him return to work as a PE teacher just seven months later.

But teaching sports theory to teenagers at Bradfield College, near Reading, left him exhausted and questioning his future career until he turned to the unique help offered by Royal Buckinghamshire Hospital (RBH), the UK’s leading spinal injury rehabilitation clinic.

Darren was 25 when he broke his C6 and C7 vertebrae when diving into the shallow end of a swimming pool just hours after arriving at a Spanish villa. His injuries left him paralysed from the chest down and with weakness in both his arms. Although he received good basic rehabilitative care at an NHS hospital, once home he was left in the care of general physiotherapists with little specialist knowledge about spinal injury.  After a year back at school, this lack of expert care left him unfit and unable to carry on.

“After the accident I was positive and tried to think about how I could do things so it didn’t change my life,” Loughborough University graduate Darren says. “But after a year I was absolutely exhausted, having neglected my own physical state. The realisation hit me that trying to do everything was too tiring.”

He enlisted the help of the Aylesbury-based RBH, which has worked intensively with tetraplegic and paraplegic patients on a daily basis for almost 30 years. Its expertly unified team includes physiotherapists offering custom care, qualified hydrotherapists on hand to give patients one-to-one therapy in the clinic’s hydrotherapy pool, and occupational therapists equipping patients for independent living.

For Darren, the highly skilled RBH staff used their rapid assessment service to immediately design him a tailored fitness programme. “They’ve done a lot of work with me in the hydrotherapy pool, as well as on the cycle and with weights,” he says. “They’ve given me quite a strict and challenging programme. I was a swimmer before the accident and know the physical benefits of it. I knew I wanted to swim, but I didn’t know how I was going to do it. They’ve shown me and have gradually pushed me more and more with it.”

As well as boosting Darren’s fitness levels to give him the energy and enthusiasm to return to the classroom, RBH physiotherapists have also helped him use callipers. These are strapped to his legs to help him stand and walk, allowing him to get away from his wheelchair. “I’ve progressed much further with my callipers than I did before I went to RBH,” he says. “Before I went there I hadn’t ever been given any actual knowledgeable plan of what I needed to do with them. When I had physiotherapy in the community I often took my callipers but ended up telling them what I was meant to be doing.

“The physios at RBH took me right back to the beginning. They have thorough expertise and set very specific short term goals for me. They said if I wanted to use the callipers I needed upper body strength, so that’s what we worked on first. Then I had to learn how to put them on myself, and then how to stand up on my own. I respond to these small goals much better.”

“Using callipers means I can stand at the same height as other people and that adds a bit of normality to my everyday life.”

As well as its trusted outpatient service, the RBH offers an intensive inpatient facility, where patients can expect therapy for up to four hours a day. Following this concentrated care, paraplegics are usually discharged within four months, and tetraplegics within six months.

“Our service is custom-made and staff from different disciplines work closely together to ensure we’re all doing the best for each patient,” says RBH head physiotherapist Eva Sobonova. “In Darren’s case our unique therapy programme has boosted his fitness level so he can achieve independent living, while our professional knowledge has proved essential when it comes to using callipers – something that may not seem particularly specialist to the untrained eye. We’ve strived to give him some sense of normality and I’m proud that we’ve achieved that with him.”


About The Royal Buckinghamshire Hospital
The Royal Buckinghamshire Hospital is a private clinic offering intensive rehabilitation services for all adult patients with spinal, stroke, neurological and head injury conditions. Tailored to each patient, and supported by some of the most respected consultants and the very latest technologies and facilities, its unique approach lowers recovery times and can significantly improve a patient’s condition and way of life.

Trusted by insurers, private consultants, primary care trusts and medical agencies around the world, The Royal Buckinghamshire hospital is a warm and welcoming environment providing the optimum environment for recovery and rehabilitation. The Royal Buckinghamshire Hospital also houses The Gatherer Partnership, pioneering objective muscle force measurement to improve conditioning and recovery from injury, notably in sport.

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