Headway

Every year at AJW Distribution, we chose a main charity on which to focus our fundraising efforts. This year, we have chosen to support Headway Cambridgeshire; a chairty for people with a brain injury and those who care about them.

Brain injury can be a life changing experience and people often need support after they have been discharged from the hospital or a rehabilitation centre.

Headway Cambridgeshire is the only local organisation that provides and on-going service which is designed to enable brain injured people along with their families and carers, to move on with the next stage of their lives.

Each day approximately 11 people in Cambridgeshire are admitted to hospital with a brain injury. For many of these people this is a life-changing event that requires dramatic readjustments. Anyone could suffer a brain injury at any time and the effects of that brain injury can be wide ranging, which means that each individual with a brain injury will have very different and complex needs. The problems that people with a brain injury, and their families, face every day affect every aspect of their lives, including their finances, employability, housing and relationships. Without support many would become isolated, distant from the communities they live in and face declining physical and mental well-being.

Headway Cambridgeshire was formed in 1989 by Sarah Durrant and her husband Peter, after Peter sustained a brain injury as the result of a car accident. When Sarah found that there were no local services to meet Peter’s needs, she founded the charity, thus providing local support for all people in the county with a brain injury.

We now work across the whole of Cambridgeshire providing a wide range of services aimed at supporting people who have experienced a brain injury. We are there to support them in hospital, provide post-discharge help, and then, in the longer-term, provide ongoing support in our hubs and in the community. Our services are designed to aid recovery and rehabilitation so that individuals with a brain injury can maintain their independence and achieve their full potential. We are also there to provide information, guidance and emotional support to family members who feel the physical and mental strain of acting as a carer for a loved one.

Each year at Headway Cambridgeshire we support approximately 700 individuals to help them adapt to, and live with, the physical, cognitive and emotional effects of a brain injury. We support individuals over the age of 16 with a variety of different types of brain injury, whether that is from a major trauma, such as a car accident or sporting injury, or from an acquired condition, such as a stroke, brain tumour or infection.