Valerie Eaton Griffith's rehabilitation work with Pat and Dahl, and the book which described their methods, A Stroke in the Family, started a medical revolution in terms of stroke therapy; they were also key catalysts in the development of the Stroke Association of today from its predecessor the Chest and Heart Association.

The origins of the Chest and Heart Association can be traced back to the National Association for the Prevention of Consumption and other forms of Tuberculosis, which was founded in 1898. The organisation's evolution over the next hundred years, shifting according to the public health priorities, is reflected in a series of name changes. The term consumption was dropped once it became outdated; tuberculosis was switched for chest and heart as the relative importance of different diseases altered. By the 1960s the Chest and Heart Association was becoming increasingly interested in stroke, and the association's director general, Dr Harley Williams, read Val's book and invited her to their conference in 1970.

Three years later at their meeting on ‘How to help the “Stroke” patient’ both Dahl and Val spoke about their experience with Pat. Val also outlined her hope to expand what had worked so well in Great Missenden into a stroke service. She wanted to establish a programme of regular home visits by volunteers to help more people with stroke overcome speech and communication problems. In addition there would be weekly ‘stroke clubs’ organised locally, with outings and social events.

Volunteers would thus support the work of professional speech therapists whose time for each patient was limited. Her plans were already being adopted in America, but not yet formally in Britain. A meeting was arranged between Val, Roald, Pat and Sir John Richardson, President of the General Medical Council, who himself had suffered a stroke, with the hope of ultimately interesting the Department of Health and Social Security. The government could not help, but the Chest and Heart Association decided to support two pilot schemes, one in the city of Oxford, and a rural one in the Chilterns. They were run by Val, three assistants and two hundred volunteers. The programme was judged by the referring general practitioners to be very successful, and was written up in the British Medical Journal.