Page 20 - Mobility Management, March 2019

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Education in Motion Seeks to Share Clinician Expertise, Experiences
If you’ve successfully fitted one client with the optimal seating and wheeled mobility system... you’ve fitted one client. No two complex rehab technology (CRT) clients, even those with the same diagnosis, are the same.
Yet, the industry does have clinicians with decades of experience, and many of them have worked with clients with diagnoses or presentations that are rare even in CRT. What if those experiences could be shared across countries and cultures?
At Sunrise Medical, it’s called Education in Motion.
Stronger with More Voices
The founding members of Education in Motion are Angie Kiger, M.Ed., CTRS, ATP/SMS, Clinical Strategy & Education Manager; Amy Bjornson, BS, MPT, ATP/SMS, Clinical Education Manager, Asia Pacific; Kim Davis, MSPT, ATP, Clinical Rehab Manager, Northeast Region; Sheilagh Sherman, BA, BHScOT, MHM, OT Reg. (Ont.), Clinical Educator, Sunrise Medical Canada; Mayari Solórzano, PT, ATP, Clinical Educator, Latin America; and Linda Bollinger, DPT, PT, ATP, Clinical Education Manager.
They’re being joined by additional Sunrise Medical clinicians as Education in Motion (www.SunriseMedical. com/eim) continues to grow.
This new resource grew out of a simple idea: Could conversations among Sunrise’s clinicians be shared?
“Within Sunrise, we call ourselves the Global Clinical Committee, and it has therapists from all over the world,” Kiger said. “We initially decided to pull together because every so often, I’d get on a marketing call with Amy [Bjornson] about what was happening in Australia, and
I heard her different perspectives. We’re all doing very similar things in the world, but different at the same time.”
The committee started with monthly calls to discuss “what we see happening across the world in CRT, what’s going on with products,” Kiger said. “Not all of our products launch at the same time worldwide. This gives us a chance to say, ‘Hey, Amy, you guys launched the Xenon2 [folding ultralight manual chair] in Australia. How’s that doing? Where do you see the benefits?’”
“We’re stronger with more voices,” Bjornson pointed out. “So if we can combine material, if we can combine resources in terms of case studies and presentations, that only makes us stronger. Across the world, I think complex rehab equipment is more similar than different.
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It’s always hard to get it funded, independent of what your government agency is. And it’s also difficult to open up clinicians to the equipment that is available beyond maybe what is on the supplier formularies. So I think we’re stronger as a global voice.”
Resources for New Clinicians
The Education in Motion Web site, live since August, features clinical articles, stories about real-life wheelchair users, blog posts and courses available from Sunrise clinicians. Blog posts include “Taking Control: Ideas
for Increasing Success with a Standard Joystick,” “The Science of Manual Tilt Mechanisms,” and “Navigating the Transition from Manual to Power Mobility.” Going forward, the site will also offer updates of popular resources from the past, such as JAY seating posters.
“We were all creating great clinical resources, but not sharing them worldwide,” Kiger noted. “Why not tap into that knowledge base and that experience base? Our goal is to have as many real-life stories on the site as possible: what was the need, what was decided on, and how was the end user was involved?”
While veteran clinicians will find useful information on the site, the Global Clinical Committee is especially focused on clinicians newer to the field or those who might not otherwise have easy access to education.
“Out of the gate,” Kiger said, “we’re trying to reach folks who are new to the industry or live in rural areas where they don’t have the access to send their clients to the big clinics.” The articles, Kiger added, are formatted so clinicians can build their own library: “[The resources are] one- or two-pagers; they can be printed out front to back and put into a notebook. We didn’t want a huge, overwhelming catalog of information, but they can build it as they see fit.”
Creating a Global CRT Library
One of Education in Motion’s greatest strengths will be reaching across countries and cultures to share the best seating and mobility knowledge. That means translating blog posts into multiple languages.
“It is one of our big issues in Latin America, the lack of resources in our language, in Spanish,” said Solórzano. “There are a lot of clinicians who speak or at least read English, so for them, it’s a little bit easier. But we have a lot of the population that doesn’t read English.”
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