Points about Heilaheill’s activities

Reykjavik 19/4 2024

Heilaheill is a voluntary association in Iceland whose purpose is to help people with aphasia brain damage. Members are people with brain damage, aphasia, and their relatives. The  work of the association is done in collaboration with specialists in the area of late brain damage. Today many specialists and others interested are also members.

In the last year, Heilaheill has focused on various areas of action.

• Heilaheill has had close cooperation with the public sector, where the aim has been to evaluate the way people are treated when they get brain damage, aphasia. We have focused on initiatives that help to shorten the time from when the injury occurs until the person is in hospital. There has also been a focus on improved treatment. We have recently created an app which helps people both recognize stroke sooner and contact the emergency center. The app can also be used by the emergency center to find the citizen. In recent years, we have been around the country to teach how to use the app. In this connection, we have also taken the opportunity to inform about risk factors for brain damage, such as stress, and encouraged people to contact their doctor if they suspect they could be in a risk group for brain damage.

• In the course of time, we have focused on aphasia, by making information leaflets, organizing group courses with speech therapists, etc. Right now we are working on getting the conversation group up and running in collaboration with speech therapists. Everyone is supposed to take part in the discussion.  The idea is to create a continuum so that the citizen has somewhere to go when treatment at the rehabilitation centers stops. In this way, we try to hold on to those affected so that they do not disappear and be forgotten. In this way, we can also maintain and build on the development that must have taken place during the rehabilitation process.

Then there is a group of people which meets regularly to read and write without specialists so called peer education. The group meets on a regular basis in a coffee house.

All this is done in cooperation with speech therapists.

Heilaheill is also trying to get people’s attention f.ex. by buy coverage in a national newspaper about aphasia and brain damage and we publish also yearly a magazin, Slagorðið is its name. (Literally the strokeword)

Heilaheill has a website, www.heilaheill.is, which is regularly updated with news and information.