Title: SCI Learning Circles

Alberta COVID Health Strategy

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, many services accessed by people with disabilities, including people living with spinal cord injury (SCI), were disrupted and social connections were limited or lost due to restrictions to keep people safe. Beginning April 2020, the SCI Community in Alberta responded, addressing these gaps bychampioning a novel virtual strategy. This strategy has two components:

Rehabilitation Advice Line (RAL): a clinician-operated phone service supported by the Alberta Health Services (AHS) Health Link® platform. It involves personnel redeployed from AHS outpatient and home services. Following pre-defined scripts, clinicians answer calls and provide condition-specific (including SCI) tele-triage, wayfinding and rehabilitation advice.

Alberta Spinal Cord Injury Community Interactive Learning Series (AB-SCILS): a monthly webinar series led by representatives from AHS and SCI-Alberta, including people with lived experience, and supported by Praxis Spinal Cord Institute. Each webinar is codesigned by lived experience experts and clinical experts so that both perspectives are shared. Webinars are available on YouTube and are open to the public. AB-SCILS will improve audience knowledge of the latest evidence in research, care and community living, creating a sense of community and improving social connectedness.

IKT Guiding Principles

A team, including spinal cord injury (SCI) researchers, research users, and funding institutions, has partnered to co-develop the “Integrated Knowledge Translation (IKT) Guiding Principles” for conducting and disseminating SCI research in partnership with research users.

The guidelines published in Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation are a foundational tool with the potential to improve the relevance and impact of SCI research, mitigate tokenism, and advance the science of IKT. (Open access.)

These eight principles are designed to help SCI researchers and research users engage more meaningfully in relevant, useful, and/or useable research. The principles represent the first rigorously co-developed, consensus-based guidance to support meaningful SCI partnerships. The principles should be used early and throughout the entire research process. Learn more www.IKTprinciples.com

[Image: IKT Guiding Principles logo]