“Upon reflection, thinking about the potential benefit or outcomes of our project to different stakeholder groups has been essential to increasing the impact of our project. We thought about what we wanted to achieve during the lifetime of the project in terms of improving awareness of stroke in clinical and community settings, but also longer-term and how this may improve patient and service user experiences of accessing stroke care.
 

We knew that our stakeholder groups would be patients, social care users and health care professionals, social care professionals and third sector organisation professionals, as well as the wider health and social care system. At the beginning of the project, we considered how we would measure or evaluate the impact of the project outputs with these stakeholder groups. Closure of a local stroke awareness information support centre during the project, was devastating to the local community. It also meant that we wanted to adapt the aims of the project to accommodate the needs of those directly affected. Had we not been engaged with different stakeholder groups; this would not have happened. It made us realise the importance of engagement with stakeholders throughout to ensure that what we needed to measure or evaluate was closely aligned to their needs and priorities.”