Croi has come a long way since it had that funding barometer sign outside the hospital, where passers-by could see just how much money it had to raise in order to give West of Ireland people a fair shot at surviving heart disease. Prior to Croi, if you had a dodgy ticker, you had to get on bone-rattling buses and cross the country in order to have your lifesaving surgery. Your chances of survival were reduced if you lived in the west. Back then too, the trauma of open heart surgery was so much more than it is today. Now, thanks to great leaps in technological advancement, bypasses and other invasive heart surgeries are becoming common and incredibly more lifesaving.
Croi was born into an Ireland reared on the Full Irish, into a part of the country where more and more people were dying from heart disease because of the way they were living their lives. In that regard, the charity was set up to tackle the killer disease of its time. It did this, and through patronages from the stars of Hollywood and the stars of all our communities, under the guidance of Neil Johnson and Prof Kieran Daly and Dr Jim Crowley and the late Ray Rooney, that barometer reached the top. Now the west has some of the finest cardiac facilities in the country with the Coronary Care Unit at UHG and the designation of the hospital as the supra-regional specialist cardiac centre.
This spread into the communities with the development of the Croi mobile emergency units and the provision of out of hospital support for heart patients and their families, as well as the programme to introduce defibrillators in our workplaces and public places.
In that regard, the Croi story had come full circle and the majority of its original goals were reached.
However, just as that era of fulfilment ended, another challenge arose on the horizon — the increasing commonality of the stroke.
To meet this need, Croi has, with the help of local communities and local authorities, constructed a fantastic facility in Newcastle, just about 800 metres from the hospital. The Croi Heart and Stroke Centre is a beautiful holistic building geared to helping people prevent and/or recover from, heart disease and stroke.
Just as Croi had been set up to tackle the killer disease of the 1980s and 1990s, now in this post Celtic Tiger era, stroke is the fearful disease creeping across the desks of GPs around the country. Now, age is no barrier to entry into the stroke club — young people under stress from the pressures of the new reality of a new Ireland are falling into the high risk category and suffering strokes.
And Croi is tackling this head on — next week it will host a series of free public talks, seminars, workshops and walk-in risk factor screening and assessments.
The week-long programme of activities marks the commencement of programmes and activities at the charity’s first-of-its-kind in Ireland facility.
Members of the public are invited to attend talks by the likes of Olympic sprinter and medical student Paul Hession who will talk about his journey to fitness and perseverance to reach the Olympic Games in London this summer.
The multi-disciplinary team at Croi House (which includes nurse specialists; a dietitian; a cardiac technician; a physical exercise specialist; physiotherapist; and a sessional doctor ), will offer free walk-in health checks to the general public during the open week. Members of the public are invited to go along to the new €3.7m building ( which has been built and paid for through fundraising and voluntary contributions ) for free blood pressure and pulse checks as well as, body mass index, and waist circumference measurement, during the open week.
For saving so many lives over the last few decades, Croi deserves our respect and support and now as it embarks on another journey to help even more of us live our lives without suffering strokes, we wish them the best. We owe it to Croi and to ourselves to get along to this Open Week and to inform ourselves and our communities of new ways of living so that in decades to come, the need for Croi may be no more.
