Monday 11 July 2016

The Tango of Rehabilitation Research

Three members of the Rehabilitation and Assistive Technology (RATS) group spoke at the summer meeting of the Society for Research in Rehabilitation (SRR) on Monday 5th July 2016. Professor Pam Enderby Emeritus Professor of Community Rehabilitation gave the first Bipin Bhakta Memorial Lecture. Pam compared the science of rehabilitation research to the art of the performing the Tango on Strictly Come Dancing. Discussing the importance of effective team working and national adoption of outcome measures and audits to allow comparison and identification of strengths and weaknesses to improve the quality of rehabilitation services. 

Dr Rebecca Palmer a Senior Clinical Lecturer in the RATS group spoke about what people with aphasia (a language disorder) want to say. Suggesting that whilst personally relevant vocabulary is unique to each individual and likely to contain specific or specialist words for which practice material needs to be individually prepared, there is some commonality in the words selected by people with aphasia which can be used to pre-prepare materials for word finding therapy targeting personally relevant vocabulary. 

Madeleine Harrison a Research Associate in the RATS group presented some of the early findings from her PhD research. The talk focused on defining and measuring the components of a complex neuro-rehabilitation intervention for aphasia. The qualitative research highlighted the active ingredients of the StepByStep approach to computerised aphasia therapy and suggestions for how the intervention fidelity should be measured within a multi-centre trial. 

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