In this bonus episode, Eric Weertz and Geraldine Jacquemin discuss the work of the ISCOS Disaster Committee and the unique difficulties faced in conflict settings that they support, including developing the ISCoS SCI toolkit.
The opinions of our host and guests are their own; ISCoS does not endorse any individual viewpoints, given products or companies.
If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate, review and subscribe with the podcast provider of your choice.
This show is brought to you by ISCoS - you can follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn
The SCI Care: What really Matters podcast aims to provide valuable insights and the most up-to-date information for those providing care to people with spinal cord injury (SCI) worldwide. The vision of the International Spinal Cord Society (ISCoS) is to "facilitate healthy and inclusive lives for people with spinal cord injury or dysfunction globally".
Partnership and collaboration are key to achieving this vision. Our episodes include expert guests, persons with lived experience and representatives from the industry supporting SCI care.
In this bonus episode, Eric Weertz and Geraldine Jacquemin discuss the work of the ISCOS Disaster Committee and the unique difficulties faced in conflict settings that they support, including developing the ISCoS SCI toolkit.
The opinions of our host and guests are their own; ISCoS does not endorse any individual viewpoints, given products or companies.
If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate, review and subscribe with the podcast provider of your choice.
This show is brought to you by ISCoS - you can follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn
The SCI Care: What really Matters podcast aims to provide valuable insights and the most up-to-date information for those providing care to people with spinal cord injury (SCI) worldwide. The vision of the International Spinal Cord Society (ISCoS) is to "facilitate healthy and inclusive lives for people with spinal cord injury or dysfunction globally".
Partnership and collaboration are key to achieving this vision. Our episodes include expert guests, persons with lived experience and representatives from the industry supporting SCI care.
Contact us directly with any questions or comments at iscos@associationsltd.co.uk
Speaker 1:
Welcome to our bonus episode of SCI Care. What Really Matters the Edinburgh Conversations. I am Dr Ali Jumous, the President of the International Spine Court Society. You are about to hear a selection of interviews recorded live in Edinburgh during the course of the 60 Seconds Escort Scientific Meeting. Each bonus track will have discussions with speakers, delegates, partners, SCO's committee chairs and teams attending the SCO's 2023. Join us to find out what the hot topics of the day are within SCI Care.
Speaker 2:
Hi, my name is Eric. I work for Humanity and Inclusion and I'm a physiotherapist and I have been a member of SCO since 1999.
Speaker 3:
Hi, I'm Gérard D'Injacment. I'm a PM and an R-Doctor, I work in Montreal, canada, and I've been doing a few work with Humanity and Inclusion, also known as HI.
Speaker 2:
Now being here and having benefited from the different workshops and having been contributing as well to the programme of the SCO's conference, we feel that we were able to highlight also the plight of people with spinal cord injury living in areas in the world that don't get much attention for their care or for their plight. Of course, the creation of the Emergency Committee more recently has brought us in touch with conflict settings, has brought us in touch with earthquake settings all over the world, and we realise then as well, that the existing features, the existing tools, were not always adequate to be able to answer directly to the needs of people with spinal cord injury in these settings.
Speaker 3:
I think in this sense, the SCI toolkit that we discussed about yesterday is probably going to be a good thing to be able to have kind of a common language when we in countries who want to develop their spinal cord programme.
Speaker 2:
Yes, it will be definitely a game changer in a sense that there are a lot of initiatives where spinal cord injury care does exist. Of course it has its flaws. The flow and the pathway of care for the patients is not always very smooth, but a toolkit, for instance, can identify where are the weak links in that pathway of care and where we can strengthen these weak links. Either it's in an emergency situation or in a development context, and for us the development context. Of course we have experiences in Southeast Asia where governments were very eager to respond to the needs to improve the lives of people with spinal cord injury in their settings. But we feel also that there is another unfortunate trend with upcoming conflicts where of course this idea of wanting to support people with spinal cord injury is not at all present anymore and not prioritised. And I think here the committee and ISCOS is also learning a lot among its members on how to address them.
Speaker 3:
I think that the workshop that was organised by Colleen and in which we participated yesterday was very relevant and we had some nice comments.
Speaker 2:
I think it was a huge success because the audience was very interested. We were at times even intimidated by the numbers that were present and that kept coming into the room on one side and on the other side. There is a huge momentum where the committee has achieved a certain capacity to respond very swiftly and when we talk about the latest events in the last three to four months, we were able, in days after the events such as Morocco, where we were able to already be in touch with actors on the ground to support them on spinal cord injury management.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, it's been very instructive to hear about the different kind of way people can participate, the different angles of view, the different types of areas of the world. Yeah, and we've been discussing regarding that, eric. We've been discussing about having the ISCOS more accessible for people in these areas where there's a higher conflict, such as well, or conflict or needs, such as low, and middle income countries.
Speaker 2:
Of course, the SCI eLearn website is very instrumental in having, at different languages, being able to use this as a teaching ground. There is, of course, also the toolkit, as we discussed before, that we can make much more sensitive to emergency issues and datasets, that where we are confronted and maybe you can be more specific on giving remote support directly to people on the ground on a regular basis in a spinal injury setting, where we need to simplify the tools, we need to simplify the means to extract the crucial data that can help people with spinal cord injury to get access to care much more quickly while the existing tools that say in developed countries, are quite difficult to use if your background or your knowledge is not sufficiently standardised.
Speaker 2:
So we need to simplify the tools as well, and that is a learning process as well.
Speaker 3:
Maybe you can comment, because there has been some massive online training for nurses, for PTs, we haven't had such a massive online training for doctors.
Speaker 2:
might be interesting, that would be interesting to look at this because we have been focusing a lot on the workforce, the biomedical workforce, but it's true that the doctors also. They need that know-how as well and having access to the simplified tools because they are key in orienting and in steering that pathway of care for the SCI person.
Speaker 3:
But as far as making the ISCOS more accessible, I think the ERC is good, sci toolkit is good. We are thinking that the convention might be also a convention location, might be something interesting to look into. I think it's in discussions. Yes, it's in discussion as well.
Speaker 2:
We really need to look that down the line as well. And the last message would be really that the public and the members of ISCOS that are genuinely interested to intervene and to make a difference for these settings, that we can develop methodologies where they can also contribute with their know-how, but on a remote basis and contributing there, because, of course, there are huge barriers to go directly on the ground to help people, because we see that with the upcoming complexity of conflicts, this is very, very difficult, very complex. So the remote teaching is maybe something we need to look more into on how it is possible, how it can be made more effective and which networks we need to tap into to make sure that it has a sustainability as well in the future.
Speaker 1:
We hope you have enjoyed listening to our bonus collection of Edinburgh Conversation from ISCOS 2023. As always, you can listen to these episodes and all episodes from the podcast provider of your choice. If you have any questions or suggestions, we would love to hear from you. Email them to admin at iscosorguk. Iscos also invites you to the 63rd ISCOS Scientific Annual Meeting from the 22nd to the 25th of September 2024. To save the date and more details, we'll follow on the 2024 themes submitting an abstract and early birth registration. Thank you for listening.
