WHO World Rehabilitation Alliance

SameYou is a member of The World Health Organisation World Rehabilitation Alliance.

SameYou has been granted membership to the newly-formed World Health Organisation’s World Rehabilitation Alliance after the organisation’s landmark ruling to commit to boosting worldwide access to rehabilitation.

Speaking at the event in Geneva on Tuesday, July 11, Jenny Clarke, CEO and Co-Founder of SameYou, outlined the power of advocacy and said survivors are the ‘people who really matter’. She said it’s important to highlight their needs, including vital mental health support, from their own lived experience to support advocacy towards policy makers.

Jenny spoke about the urgent need for information for survivors to make the best recovery possible, understanding from clinicians to understand conditions and the hidden symptoms of brain injury, and empathy and social awareness from the public.

Jenny said: “We are focused on trying to make aware the need for rehabilitation, particularly in young adults after an acquired brain injury. So what does awareness mean? It doesn't mean very much unless you put action to it. And so what we see is really, really important is to allow people who have experienced brain injury to be able to tell their stories and to see where that leads us.”

Jenny told the meeting about her daughter Emilia surviving two brain haemorrhages and co-founding SameYou which led to thousands of survivors getting in contact to share their stories – and revealing that access to rehabilitation is seriously inadequate.

She added: “Emilia recovered very well. We thought, are we just going to leave it like that and say thank you very much?

“Or are we going to see if we can use her visibility to make a stand. So again, we didn't know what that would look like. So we started to take the action but what we also started to do was to receive a massive, massive amount of communications back to us.

“So that means that the demand is there. We really see that the role that we can play is to talk to young adults who've had an acquired brain injury. We can really feel the power of that advocacy, and I seriously believe it, because people have said to us the difference that it actually makes to them to know that somebody is in their corner, really trying to call for change.”

Linked WHO stories:

WHO leader thanks SameYou for joining World Rehabilitation Alliance as it marks World Brain Day

SameYou granted WRA membership