Why do caregivers of someone with a spinal cord injury need to be trained before leaving the hospital? - Patti Rogers, SW

The primary reason is because if you wait until you go home, whose going to train you? You’ve got home-health nurses, but a lot of the time home-health nurses don’t know as much as they should about somebody with a spinal cord injury. So as much as training as you can give that family member—whether it’s the wife, the mom, the brother, the sister—before they go home, it’s going to make the transition a lot easier. We all know that being in a rehab hospital, that’s a wonderful and glorious setting, but when you go home, things are different. You don’t have six-foot-wide halls; you don’t have a bathroom that has a roll-in shower. What you’ve learned to do in the rehab hospital is a good thing but sometimes when you get home, it’s not going to work. So they’ve got to train the caregivers as much as they can.