Paper short abstract:

This paper will recount experiences teaching community-based rehabilitation workers in Bhutan to assist stroke survivors. It will speculate on the adaptation of future courses, focusing on how motivation may differ between the trainees and the stroke survivors.

Paper long abstract:

Working with stroke survivors requires an open understanding from the trainee community-based rehabilitation (CBR) worker to place them at the center of the interaction, usually termed 'person-centered care.' Developing this perspective is often a challenge to the trainee. Taught and developed by an experienced clinician educator and anthropologist, this course in Bhutan was implemented to bring the trainees away from a strictly biomedical gaze in their decision-making process toward treatment approaches guided by the stroke survivor and their lived experiences within the sociocultural context. Despite not having medical backgrounds, often, the well-meaning trainees in the past courses were deterred from the impact of sociocultural aspects of the stroke survivors' lives and instead emphasized the medical pathology post-stroke. This paper will explore how these trainees' motivations may have developed using an informed anthropological approach to seek changes to future courses. Future work may be structured within a more collaborative framework based on an iterative process of listening more openly to stroke survivors' narratives regarding their needs within the community and the family networks in which they live.