Polio - The Late Effects Reality

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

"People with disabilities do not want to be pitied, nor do they want their disabilities to be dismissed as of little importance. All that is required is a little respect and basic needs and rights. Surely that is not too much to ask?"

Submission to The Commission on the Status of People with Disabilities (Strategy for Equality, 1996)

The Post Polio Support Group thanks the following for their part-sponsorship of this survey and report, for without them the project would never have been started, let alone brought to publication:

Comhairle
East Coast Area Health Board
Katharine Howard Foundation
Midland Health Board
Mid-Western Health Board
North Eastern Health Board
Northern Area Health Board
South Eastern Health Board
Southern Health Board
South Western Area Health Board
The Polio Fellowship of Ireland
Western Health Board

The Post Polio Support Group and the author would like to thank the following for their kind assistance and co-operation in this project: Nora Stewart of Team Training Ireland, the Occupational Therapists who visited the respondents and conducted the survey report interviews,The Central Statistics Office in Cork, Espri DMC Ltd. and, finally, Caroline O’Kelly for all her assistance in the preparation and verification of the statistical data.

The author also wishes to thank the Board of the Post Polio Support Group for all their support and patience during the preparation and writing of this report, to them it must have seemed that the task would never end. The author also wishes to thank the volunteers and staff of the Post Polio Support Group for their unswerving and never ending assistance, despite many setbacks in bringing this report to publication.

However, to those members of the Post Polio Support Group who agreed to take part in this survey are due the greatest thanks. They, their families and carers, gave information, sometimes of a very personal nature, without fear or favour. We can only hope that their generosity will make a difference not just for them but, also, all those others in the community who are suffering from the Late Effects of Polio.