Winter 2023

Many companies are still struggling to find enough workers and that has helped boost employment of people with disabilities, and data suggests that employers will want to hold on to the talent and loyalty of their workers with disabilities when the next downturn comes.

Volunteering in a shelter for young adults experiencing housing instability and substance abuse sparked Kara Link's interest in psychology and research.

An interest in engineering and an early experience shadowing a prosthetist led Emily Dinelli to a career in research to improve outcomes for people who use prosthetics and orthotics. 

Linda Ehrlich-Jones, PhD, RN, was named a Fellow of the American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine (ACRM). She received a plaque to commemorate the honor from Pamela Roberts, PhD, ACRM President, at the ACRM Annual Conference in Atlanta on November 1, 2023. 

The designation recognizes members with an outstanding record of professional service to ACRM who have also made contributions of national significance to the field of medical rehabilitation.

Investigators led by Miriam Rafferty, DPT, PhD, a research scientist in the Center for Rehabilitation Outcomes Research at Shirley Ryan AbilityLab, surveyed 60 individuals diagnosed with Parkinson's disease within the last five years. Over half of participants reported financial stress comparable to that of people with advanced cancer.

The Rehabilitation Measures Database now has a total of 557 measures, 32 of which are employment related. We added two new infographics to the database recently, the Canadian Occupational Performance Measure and the Mini Balance Evaluations Systems Test. You can see all our infographics in one place.

Are you an educator, researcher or student working towards becoming a physical or occupational therapist, speech-language pathologist or vocational rehabilitation counselor? Become an RMD collaborator! We are always looking for new collaborators to help enhance the RMD by providing original and updated summaries of rehabilitation outcome measures. If interested, please email us at rehabmeasures@sralab.org.

On this episode of INside the OUTcomes: A Rehabilitation Research Podcast, we talk with

Mark Harniss, PhD, Director of the UW Disability Studies Program at the University of Washington, Seattle, and Heather Evans, PhD, Director of Research for the Northwest ADA Center.

Mark and Heather are developing an interactive decision guide designed to help people think through requesting a reasonable accommodation at work.

Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.  

The contents of this newsletter were developed under a grant from the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR grant 90RTEM0001). NIDILRR is a Center within the Administration for Community Living (ACL) in the Department of Health and Human Services (DHSS). The contents of this newsletter do not necessarily represent the policy of NIDILRR, ACL or DHSS.