Christina Papadimitriou P.h.D.
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RESOURCES

& Resourcefulness

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This section offers a number of resources that I refer to in my research:
1) Information from a number of organizations, and
2) Definitions used in disability research.


ORGANIZATIONS

 1. D . J. Brown’s book, The Meaning of Careful.  “Dr. D J Brownʼs innovative guide to patient and staff centered transformation in the healthcare sector –The Meaning of Careful – addresses the pressing need to improve both patient safety and cost efficiencies while, at the same time, nurturing staff morale and improving the patient experience.” This is a free e-book.
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 2. Ten Guiding Principles for Person-Centered Care I use these principles in my work. Chris MacDonell at CARF.org designed it. I use these 10 principles of PERSON CENTERED CARE in my research. These are provided by the Commission of Accreditation of Rehabilitation Facilities (CARF)
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3. Institute for Healthcare Improvement (in collaboration with the National Institute for Children's Health Quality and the Institute for Patient- and Family-Centered Care) Cambridge, MA, USA. “This self-assessment tool allows organizations to understand the range and breadth of elements of patient- and family-centered care and to assess where they are against the leading edge of practice. Use this self-assessment tool to assess how your organization is performing in relation to specific components of patient- and family-centered care, or as a basis for conversations about patient-centeredness in the organization.
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4. Client-Centered Practice in Spinal Cord Injury Rehabilitation: A Field Guide 
I developed this Field Guide for allied health professionals in spinal cord injury rehabilitation based on empirical research funded by the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research 
NIDILRR. You can download it here for free. This field guide is sponsored by the Commission on Accreditation of Rehabilitation Facilities (CARF.org)

CLIENT CENTERED PRACTICE IN SPINAL CORD INJURY REHAB
File Size: 4466 kb
File Type: pdf
Download File

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5. Patient-/Resident-Centered Designation Program was created by Planetree to recognize healthcare providers around the world that have embraced and implemented patient-/resident-centered care in a comprehensive manner. This approach to care is characterized by providers partnering with patients/residents and their family members to identify and satisfy the full range of their needs and preferences. In addition to improving the patient/resident experience, patient-/resident-centered organizations also focus on supporting the professional and personal aspirations of their staff members, who can more effectively care for patients and residents if they are cared for themselves.” 
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6. Patient-Centered Care Improvement Guide. Frampton S, Guastello S, Brady C, Hale M, Horowitz S, Bennett Smith S, Stone S. Derby, Connecticut: Planetree; October 2008.  “This Guide is designed as a practical resource for health care organizations that are striving to become more patient-centered. It contains best practices and practical implementation tools contributed by hospitals from across the United States. The Self-Assessment Tool can help identify and prioritize opportunities for introducing patient-centered approaches into your organization.” ​
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7. Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario (RNAO) “The Person-and Family-Centred Care best practice guideline can be used to enhance the quality of partnerships between health-care providers with individuals accessing care, ultimately improving clinical outcomes.”
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8. Recovery Coaching or Health Coaching in Hampshire United Kingdom: Patient, carer and staff feedback often tell us that service users and carers are frequently disempowered by acute care provision, environments and attitudes. It is a busy environment and can lead to a passive delivery of care across staff groups in a manner that might be debilitating to patient groups, building dependency and reducing their independence. 
Hampshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust aimed to address this issue by developing a way that they could become partners with their patients (in this paper, with inpatients in acute elderly care rehabilitation). They developed the concept of "recovery coaching" and designed a training intervention to achieve "coaching conversations" between staff and patients.

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The BMJ is a weekly peer-reviewed medical trade journal, published by the trade union the British Medical Association. The BMJ has editorial freedom from the BMA. It is one of the world's oldest general medical journals.
Please click on the above BMJ logo for a PDF of the article and supplementary material. Thank you.
Abstract
Our patient, carer, and staff feedback clearly tells us that elderly patients are frequently disempowered by acute care provision, environments, and attitudes. This debilitates individuals mentally and physically, reducing their independent functioning, and may mean that they require prolonged care or are unfit to return home.
We developed the concept of "recovery coaching" to support acute inpatient elderly care rehabilitation. We designed a training intervention to achieve "coaching conversations" between our staff and our patients.
Data were collected from 46 participants; 22 in the pre-intervention stage and 24 in the post-intervention stage. For the post-intervention patients, mean scores indicated that there was slightly higher increase in the patient’s independence in terms of their Barthel (ADL) scores and that they reported higher feelings of self-efficacy. For this patient group it was also found that more returned home with the same level of care as on their admission, and that fewer patients required residential care placements at discharge.
This innovative intervention allowed us to challenge the fundamental basis of “I do it for you” to “I will do it with you”, allowing the patient to become an integral partner in their health care.
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial License, which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non commercial and is otherwise in compliance with the license.
bmjopenquality.bmj.com/content/3/1/u205646.w2316


9. Schwartz Rounds: A Schwartz round is typically a monthly meeting at which healthcare professionals consider the caring and human dimensions of their work. The focus is on the health professionals themselves, allowing staff from all disciplines to consider their experience of providing care – especially any challenging emotional or social issues. The purpose of the Rounds is not to solve problems, but to explore the human and psychological aspects of the experience of delivering care and the demands that staff face from day to day. 
The Round, named after Kenneth Schwartz, a Boston-based lawyer who died of lung cancer in his forties. Before he died, he wrote movingly about the positive impact of receiving compassionate care and described how it “made the unbearable bearable”, and at the same time he recognized the emotional cost to staff this involves. By creating safe space for reflection, Schwartz rounds give staff the opportunity to share some of the emotional or psychological aspects of their work that that may otherwise build up, causing stress and anxiety and impeding their ability to deliver compassionate.
Today, supported by the Schwartz Center for Compassionate Healthcare, the approach is used in more than 300 organizations in the United States. Schwartz Rounds began in the UK in 2009 with two one year pilots, and are now run by the Point of Care Foundation. Setting up and running Schwartz Centre Rounds – a practical handbook.

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10. Reassembled, Slightly Askew This  is a performance that can be used in medical training.  "Reassembled, Slightly Askew" is an autobiographical, audio-based artwork about Shannon’s experience of falling critically ill with a rare brain infection and her journey of rehabilitation with an acquired brain injury. Audience members experience Reassembled... individually, listening to the audio via headphones, while lying on a hospital bed. The audio technology makes the sound three-dimensional, causing listeners to feel they are inside Shannon’s head, viscerally experiencing her descent into coma, brain surgeries, early days in the hospital, and re-integration into the world with a hidden disability. It is a new kind of storytelling, never done before about this topic, that places the listener safely in the first-person perspective to increase empathy and understanding--it's one step better than walking in someone's shoes, it's living in someone else's head." 
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11. Shepherd Center patient education Shepherd Center is a world-renowned center for neurological and neuromuscular research. Research studies are conducted in collaboration with leading experts at other hospitals, research centers, medical schools and universities around the world.

Shepherd Center's research activities primarily focus on spinal cord injury, brain injury, multiple sclerosis and neuromuscular disorders.
Shepherd Center aims to develop, refine and evaluate new treatments, drugs, surgical techniques, diagnostic tools and therapeutic interventions. Shepherd Center also works to improve the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of clinical services, as well as document the long-term effectiveness and benefits of rehabilitation to improve patient outcomes.

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DEFINITIONS

Terms Defined
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Disability

From the desk of Dr. Papadimitriou:
Disability Studies is a field that sees disability as a social, cultural, and political phenomenon. This is in contrast to clinical or medical perspectives of disability. Disability Studies is a vibrant advocacy and academic field that focuses on how disability is defined and represented in society. It rejects the perception of disability as a functional impairment that limits a person’s activities. Disability is not a characteristic that exists in the person or a problem of the person that must be “fixed” or “cured.” Rather, disability is a social and cultural construct. ​
Disability is defined differently by different social groups. For medical and benefit purposes, disability is typically seen an impairment that may be cognitive, developmental, intellectual, mental, physical, sensory, or some combination of these. It substantially affects a person's life activities and may be present from birth or occur during a person's lifetime. There are different definitions of disability that can serve different purposes. For example, in the USA, Social Security Administration defines it as a person who cannot work as before; the administration decides that the disabled person cannot adjust to the work because of medical conditions; and/or that the disability has lasted or is expected to last for at least one year or to result in death.  The UN Convention  offers an important view that persons with disability have human rights. Specifically, "The Convention is intended as a human rights instrument with an explicit, social development dimension. It adopts a broad categorization of persons with disabilities and reaffirms that all persons with all types of disabilities must enjoy all human rights and fundamental freedoms. It clarifies and qualifies how all categories of rights apply to persons with disabilities and identifies areas where adaptations have to be made for persons with disabilities to effectively exercise their rights and areas where their rights have been violated, and where protection of rights must be reinforced."

From the desk of Dr. Papadimitriou:
In my own work I have explained that “Although there is growing debate among disability studies writers about how to best define disability (see Finkelstein, French, and Oliver 1993; Oliver 1990, 1992; Morris 1991; Linton 1998; Watson 2002; Shakespeare and Watson 2001; Hughes 2007; Shakespeare 2006, and many others), this work supports a definition of disability that starts with an embodied subject and allows disability to be defined in relational terms. Using phenomenological and critical perspectives, I see disability as the complex interplay of body, environment, culture and personal characteristics ‘which serve to exclude certain people from becoming full participants in interpersonal, social, cultural, economic and political affairs’ (Marks 1999, 611; Shakespeare 2006). From phenomenology I use methodological and epistemic insights to listen to the lived experiences of disabled persons in order to learn about the experience of disability from those who experience it, rather than imposing theoretical categories onto experience. To this I add a disability studies or social model of disability perspective in order to expose the normative/oppressive features of living with disability and to show that (and how) re-embodiment after SCI is possible, thus seeing persons with disability as newly abled. In this way I stay faithful to the lived experience of disability and committed to identifying ableist attitudes that hinder the actual lives of disabled persons.” (2008 enwheeled paper)

EMBODIMENT

Embodiment: Phenomenologists argue that rather than having a body, we are our bodies. Our experiences and meanings are grounded in the ways our bodies, social habits, relationships are involved in and with the world (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 1962; Crossley 1996: 28). This involvement in the world happens because embodied beings form a part of the world that they open onto. This also means that they open onto each other. Importantly, this perspective of embodiment states that it is meaningful behavior that opens them to each other, not their sheer visibility as embodied beings (Crossley 1996:30), nor their capacity to perceive and organize sense data. In this sense, human interaction is a dialogue between self and other within an intersubjective (meaningful) ground, not a raw physical world. Finally, existence is fundamentally dialectical and ambiguous (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 1962:198) and always and inevitably culturally immersed (Csordas 1994). Actions, ideas, choices are not the property of individuals but of the dialogue among embodied beings out into which and through which they exist.  For more information on the current relevance on phenomenological embodiment see Hubert L. Dreyfus    

EQUITY

Equity has to do with everyone having access to fair and equal treatment under the law, regardless of race, social class, ability/disability, or gender. In my work I use the principles outlined by the Canadian Coalition for Global Health Research (CCGHR) Principles for Global Health Research 

PERSON-CENTERED CARE

Person-Centered Care “Informs the work we do, provide guidance for decisions making, and improves outcomes.” Chris MacDonell from the Commission on Accreditation of Rehabilitation Facilities (CARF), an international, non-profit organization, authors a clear, helpful, and in-depth diagram of Person-Centered Care


PHENOMENOLOGY

Phenomenology is the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view. The central structure of an experience is its intentionality, its being directed toward something, as it is an experience of or about some object. An experience is directed toward an object by virtue of its content or meaning (which represents the object) together with appropriate enabling conditions.
Phenomenology as a discipline is distinct from but related to other key disciplines in philosophy, such as ontology, epistemology, logic, and ethics. Phenomenology has been practiced in various guises for centuries, but it came into its own in the early 20th century in the works of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and others. For more information about phenomenology see the  Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy


SOCIAL JUSTICE

Social Justice extends the concept of Equity to include human rights as part of the social contract. 



At-A-Glance
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© COPYRIGHT 2025 Christina Papadimitriou, Ph.D.  
  • HOME
  • CURRENT RESEARCH
    • SPARCdm
    • OUR PEERS-EMPOWERMENT
    • NO ONE LISTENS TO ME
    • CLINICIAN'S SENSE-MAKING
  • PUBLICATIONS
  • Definitions
    • Phenomenology
    • SJ & Equity