Organisations & politics
- 03 Jul 2009
This year's NZRA AGM has been been scheduled to occur during a lunch break in the upcoming AFRM/NIRR/NZRA Rehabilitation Conference. All NZRA members and any other interested parties are welcome and encouraged to attend! The organisation runs on the goodwill and participation of interested individuals. Membership forms will be available to anyone attending, and this year the NZRA membership fees has recently been set at a Special Rate of $1 per year. What have you got to loose! Agenda items and proposed changes to our Constitution are listed in this column along with information about the time and venue of the AGM. Read more »
The Cochrane Collaboration is a free (in NZ) online resource that brings you rigorous, independent reviews of best research evidence regarding treatment decisions. Now, selections from this service are brought to you via podcast. Read more »
- 18 May 2009
Tony Ryall, Minister of Heath, has recently culled the total number of performance targets for the nation's 21 DHBs from ten to six - and yet the emphasis is still on increasing inputs rather than achieving better health outcomes. Arguably, rehabilitation suffers when financial incentives are aligned with surgery rates rather than improvements in functional abilities and quality of life. Like it or not, rehabilitation providers are at the mercy of health funding structures - the more we know about them, the better. Read more »
- 16 Apr 2009
The AFRM/NIRR/NZRA Rehabilitation Conference 2009 will be held in Queenstown from 21-25 July. (Visit www.rehabconference2009.org.nz for details.) The deadline for Early Bird Registration is closing 15 May 2009, so get in quick and register now! Read more »
- 14 Apr 2009
Since I came out as a gay man at 19 years old, I've been a user of home-based support, needs assessments, wheelchair assessments, physiotherapists as well as other health professionals and services, even rehabilitation at times. Every service provider, in my experience, has assumed I am heterosexual. Unless I actually say, ‘I'm a gay man', people assume I'm straight. That assumption operates at all levels of the organisation - from management, to administration, to individual staff. Read more »
- 13 Apr 2009
Working in the health sector and needing a 'pick me up'? This website is essentially an archive of short video clips featuring health professionals from various background talking about what keeps them interested, engaged and (as per the label on the box) passionate about their work. Read more »
- 27 Mar 2009
2009 is the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of his seminal book ‘Origin of Species’. The theory of evolution is one of the most important biological discoveries, period. However, evolution has also been mis-used to promote thoroughly bad ideas such as eugenics and social engineering. In the area of disability, the theory of evolution is tainted with these notions and terms such as ‘survival of fittest’ and ‘natural selection’ are quite offensive and gives the theory of evolution a bad name (which I think it might not deserve). There are two threads of thinking that I want to very briefly explore to show that the theory of evolution need not be seen as the ‘enemy’, and may actually be helpful in understanding human behaviour. Read more »
Early this year I reported on a submission I made with two colleagues to a ministerial taskforce on the development of the Primary Health Care workforce. The report from this taskforce is now in, and while interprofessional education (IPE) gets some coverage, there is still a lot of work to do in this area of clinical training in NZ. An upcoming workshop on IPE, to be held in Wellington in February 2009, is part of this ongoing work. Read more »
- 07 Oct 2008
Maria Low is a Clinical Nurse Specialist in Rehabilitation for the Burwood Spinal Unit, Canterbury District Health Board (CDHB). Recently, Maria wrote a successful business proposal to CDHB for additional hours dedicated to addressing sexuality in rehabilitation and last month she was appointed to that role. Read more »
- 01 Oct 2008
In August I attended the APA Conference in Boston. This was my first trip to the US and I was excited to be travelling to that great mythical place to see it in reality. I was mostly excited about travelling to the home of the American With Disabilities Act; had the land of the free really become the land of access and inclusion? How would it compare to the land of the Human Rights Act where access and inclusion are tolerated so long as they are reasonable? Read more »
- 09 Sep 2008
In June of this year I travelled with my wife Michelle, and 3 month old son Josh, to Stockholm in Sweden, not on some fanatical ABBA related pilgrimage (I’ll leave that to my parents generation), but to study a radically different approach to spinal cord rehabilitation – the Spinalis model. Read more »
- 08 Sep 2008
Claire Freeman ponders the reclaimation of derogatory terms about disability, by people with disability, and speculates on the extent to which she herself identifies with language associated with disability - particularly the language that is used in the current health science literature. Read more »
- 23 Aug 2008
The United Nations Convention of Rights of Persons with Disabilities came into force on 3 May 2008. Why is this convention so important and where are we at in meeting its objectives? Read more »
- 22 Aug 2008
One of the interesting topics at the recent Australian Faculty of Rehabilitation Medicine annual meeting in Adelaide (May 2008) was a whole stream of papers about cancer survivorship and rehabilitation. Given that more and more people are surviving their initial cancer diagnosis, but with ongoing disability, is this an area in which rehabilitation services should developing? Read more »
- 06 Jul 2008
The NZRA is holding its conference next year, 22-25 July 2009, in partnership with the Australasian Faculty of Rehabilitation Medicine and the New Zealand National Institute of Rehabilitation Research. Read more »
- 22 Jun 2008
The NZRA will be holding its Annual General Meeting on 31 July 2008 from 8-9pm by audioconference. Read on for more information regarding how to join the AGM by freephone. (Freephone from NZ landlines only). Read more »
Earlier in February I had the opportunity to make a submission to a ministerial taskforce on the development of the workforce in New Zealand’s Primary Health Care Sector. One reason I took this opportunity was to raise the profile of Interprofessional Education (IPE) for health professional in New Zealand. Unlike other countries New Zealand has no central organisation to advise on and advocate for IPE. Given the importance attributed to teamwork in the health sector (and in rehabilitation in particular) perhaps this is an issue that we need to address sooner rather than later. Read more »
- 22 Jun 2008
The safety of people admitted to New Zealand hospitals has featured prominently in the media this year. Dr Will Taylor debates the need to teaching and research into safety in hospitals for people with disabilities. Read more »
- 06 Jun 2008
Got a disease that only you can pronounce? Or perhaps you recently had a patient come to your clinic with a disorder that you secretly had to look up in a textbook to find out what it was? Maybe you are just looking for information and support to provide people with one of the hundreds of less common pathologies? Then this website is for you. Read more »
- 06 Jun 2008
Ben Goldacre's Bad Science column from the Guardian presented as a weblog. An entertaining and sometimes crazy look at the way the media (and others) misrepresent science. Read more »
Want to receive a regular, free electronic newsletter featuring summaries of recent research in rehabilitation brought together by Professor Kath McPherson? Read more »
Anne Ronaldson, Nurse Specialist for "Rehab Plus" at Auckland District Health Board, advocates for the role of nursing in rehabilitation and discusses the possibility of a set up of a special interest group for rehabilitation nursing in New Zealand. Read more »
- 26 Oct 2007
The Ministry of Social Development and the Carers Alliance have been conducting community-based consultation on developing a national "Carer's Strategy". Keep up with the play on support for carers or contribute your own perspectives to the development of the strategy. Read more »
ACC has recently announced that it has launched a National Serious Injury Service that will specialise in working with people who have a permanent disability as a result of an injury. Read more »
- 18 Oct 2007
AllNurses is a forum with an active online community of over 243,000 registered members and 500 nursing topics. A section has been allocated to 'rehabilitation nursing'. Directions are given here to access the website and navigate its content. Read more »
Rehabilitation appears to have a low profile in the health sector, commanding less attention in the media than other speciality areas such as primary health or surgery. Perhaps it is time we started agitating for a larger slice of the pie? Read more »
This paper describes the outcomes from the first annual report of the Australasian Rehabiliation Ouctome Centre (AROC). A number of rehabilitation service in New Zealand have recently joined (or considered joining) the AROC network. This report provide examples from Australia of the type of data that could result from such networking. Read more »
Alison Masters is a psychiatrist in the Early Intervention Service for Mental Health Services at Capital & Coast District Health Board (CCDHB). She gives the lowdown on providing early interention for young adults with psychosis, the role of consumer advisors in mental health services and the place of rehabilitation principles in the management of psychiatric illness. Read more »
Having reviewed over the last year a number of web-based discussion boards that have been either deserted or populated mainly by spam, it’s nice to finally find one or two to write positively about. This one is a forum for discussion of physiotherapy - or "physical therapy" as they call it in the US. Read more »
Shakespeare wrote 'a rose by any other name would smell as sweet'. What about an institution by any other name? William Levack debates claims regarding the closure of the Kimberley Centre marking 'the end of institutionalisation in New Zealand'. Read more »
The Cochrane Collaboration is an international not-for-profit organisation that aims to produce and disseminate up-to-date, accurate information about the effects of healthcare. The Cochrane Collaboration libraries are now free for all New Zealanders to access through the Ministry of Health webiste... if you know where to look. Read more »
- 01 Jul 2007
This month’s interview is with Julian Verkaaik, Manager of the Burwood Academy of Independent Living (BAIL). BAIL is an independent public trust, situated at the Burwood Hospital campus in Christchurch, and established in Feb 2006. Read more »
One of the challenging aspects of rehabilitation is the interprofessional and intersectorial nature of it. There is a need for greater opportunities to share and discuss ideas between the various stakeholder in the rehabilitation sector... Enter the NZRA website! Read more »
Philip Patston
