Disability Action Week. Access Ignites: It's Good Business
25 November – 2 December
Access Ignites: it’s good business.
As a research organisation at the forefront of the latest understandings and breakthroughs in disability and rehabilitation, The Hopkins Centre was proud to celebrate this year’s Disability Action Week. Our research brings together academic, clinical and citizen researchers around important challenges in rehabilitation and disability service delivery and community support. As a Centre, we are passionate about this year’s Disability Action Week theme Access Ignites: It’s Good Business, understanding the importance of access and inclusion for people with lived experience of disability and rehabilitation. We see that 'access and inclusion' don’t always refer to physical spaces and places. The work of our researchers is deeply founded in improving access for all.
Our researchers embed co-design and collaboration with people with lived experience of disability and rehabilitation, voices and perspectives at the centre of our research. 'Dignity' is also a foundational aspect of all of our research projects, focusing on upholding the fundamental human rights for all, in everything we do. Whether our research is delivering capacity-building, addressing clinical rehabilitation challenges, or providing daily-life solutions for consumer-experts with disability, the translation and impact of those initiatives is underpinned by access and inclusion throughout the research process, evidence-based solution building or service delivery of disability and rehabilitation.
Here is a sneak-peek of research happening at The Hopkins Centre, in celebration of this year’s Disability Action Week.
Towards Translation of Novel Neurorehabilitation Systems: A Practical Approach to Usability Testing
Recent work undertaken by researchers from The Hopkins Centre emphasises the importance of early and iterative involvement of people with disability during the development of neurorehabilitation technologies. Their publication outlines a practical and collaborative approach to conducting and analyzing data to understand the perceived usability and acceptability of technology among the people with disability who will use it.
Dr Kelly Clanchy recently presented a poster from the same project at the International Conference on Rehabilitation Robotics 2023, part of Rehab Week, 2023, in Singapore during September. The poster showed how the team’s “think-aloud” protocol integrates diverse stakeholders in usability testing of technologies for rehabilitation.
Translation and implementation of an early ABI Vocational Rehabilitation Framework to clinical practice in Queensland
Hopkins Centre members Dr Kerrin Watter and Areti Kennedy, from the Acquired Brain Injury Transitional Rehabilitation Service (ABI TRS) at PA Hospital, have received a NIIIS-Q Research and Education Grant (2023-24) to support the delivery of translation and implementation workshops on the early ABI Vocational Rehabilitation Framework to clinicians across Queensland. The workshops support clinicians to translate and implement components of the ABI Vocational Rehabilitation Framework and associated tools to their own clinical setting. The workshop series, training tools and clinical resources were previously developed and piloted through a Hopkins Centre Translation and Implementation Seed Grant (2021-22).
Demand has been high for the training, with over 60 clinicians expressing interest to attend. Two in-person workshop series have successfully been delivered - in Townsville (30-31 October, 2023) to NIIS-Q providers and Queensland Health clinicians, and in Brisbane (13 + 27 November, 2023) to NIIS-Q providers. These workshops were delivered by ABI TRS clinicians Kerrin (Clinical Lead + Speech Pathologist) and Alena Murray (Occupational Therapist).
The next phase of this project involves developing an online version of the workshops, plus providing time-limited implementation support to workshop attendees, to help support ongoing translation and implementation to local clinical practice of the ABI VR framework.
This training directly aligns with the recent 2023 Disability Action Week theme “Access ignites: it's good business”, which seeks to improve workplace accessibility and inclusion for adults with disability, and also highlight bottom-line business benefits of this approach. Training rehabilitation clinicians who work with adults with ABI who have goals of returning to work post-injury is a significant local contribution towards these objectives.
Enabled VIP
Enabled is an NFP virtual incubator for Australians living with a disability.
Over 4 million Australians live with some form of disability. Disability rate for Australians of ‘prime working age’ is currently around 15% (2.2. million people) 45% of people with disability live on or near the poverty line. Looking internationally, we see the number of people who live with a disability who are working for themselves and operating a small business is higher than other groups in society.
When you talk to Australians living with a disability you often hear the same points repeated again and again:
- The need for access to resources and information.
- Feelings of isolation.
- Trepidation because of the above.
Enabled aims to address these issues by offering:
- Online and on-call mentoring.
- An online resource library of material in everyday language with practical support.
- The TRIBE discussion board so Enabled members can share ideas and information.
- Webinars and online events.
- The BAZAAR – An online marketplace of people living with a disability.
- A Professional development plan
- Online training
- A business plan
Click here to connect with Enabled.VIP via LinkedIn.
