Let’s Take a Peek at NIDILRR’s Outcome Domains: Health and Function

Welcome back to our series that highlights NIDILRR’s Outcome Domains. This month, we will be looking at NIDILRR’s Health and Function Outcome Domain. This outcome domain focuses NIDILRR-funded research that addresses challenges to individual care, services, and supports for people with disabilities. Topics within this domain include medical rehabilitation; health and wellness programs; service delivery; short- and long-term interventions; systems research; and new and emerging disabilities. NIDILRR’s model systems are funded under this outcome domain.

In 2018, NIDILRR funded 88 projects that look at health and function for people with disabilities from different angles. These projects include:

1. The project, Motivating Self-Management Through Multi-Media Health Promotion, is developing two web-based workshop curricula for community-based agencies to deliver health promotion and independent living training, and services to people with disabilities living in the community. The first curriculum, Living Well in the Community, is a multi-media curriculum based on the 4^th edition of Living Well with a Disability curriculum developed by the NIDILRR-funded Research and Training Center on Disability in Rural Communities (RTC: Rural). The second curriculum, Community Living Skills, is a new multimedia independent living skills curriculum to help increase consumer knowledge, motivation, and confidence for engaging in self-management activities and for living independently in the community. These curricula help to improve the health of people with disabilities by increasing their access to evidence-based health promotion curricula and provide an opportunity to build important life skills to live independently in the community.
2. The Rehabilitation Research and Training Center (RRTC) on Promoting Healthy Aging for People with Long-Term Physical Disabilities (IDEAL RRTC) promotes the health aging of adults with long-term physical disabilities by identifying factors at the intersection of the person and environment that impede or support positive health and function outcomes and creating solutions that improve the fit between the two. Researchers at the Center work to identify how different person-level characteristics interact with environmental characteristics to influence healthy aging for people with physical disabilities; identify best practices for promoting health aging with physical disabilities across people from diverse socioeconomic communities; and developing a suite of informed interventions that promote healthy aging at the intersection of person and environment. The outcomes of the Center’s research include a better understanding of the person-environment fit so that people with physical disabilities, their families, and care providers can optimize healthy aging.

The projects within the Health and Function Outcome Domain produce peer-reviewed articles, factsheets, videos, guides, and more. Here is a sample of what two of the Health and Function Domain projects have produced:

1. The article from the NIDILRR-funded Rehabilitation Research and Training Center on Integrated Health Care & Self-Directed Recovery, Abstinence and use of community-based cessation treatment after a motivational intervention among smokers with severe mental illness, discusses a study that examined the use of cessation treatments and predictors of abstinence among smokers with severe mental illness after a brief, web-based motivational intervention in a community mental health setting. The participants were adult smokers with severe mental illnesses who used a single-session motivational decision support system that encouraged them to quit smoking using an evidence-based cessation treatment. Overall, the intervention engaged most of the participants in cessation activity. Researchers suggest that future research should establish strategies that improve motivation for, access to, and retention in cessation treatment.
2. The brief, HealthMatters for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities: Building communities of practice for health from the NIDILRR-funded Rehabilitation Research and Training Center on Developmental Disabilities and Health, focuses on a communities of practice for health (CoP-H) initiative designed to build capacity to implement accessible health promotion programs for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). HealthMatters, an evidence-based health promotion program for people with IDD, focuses on achieving widespread transformation of policy, fiscal budgets, and services to support health promotion initiatives for people with IDD and their caregivers. Emerging evidence shows the current scalability and success of the initiative.

If you would like to learn more about NIDILRR’s Outcome Domains, other projects or products within the Health and Function Outcome Domain, or would like more information about employment for people with disabilities, please contact NARIC’s information specialists.Let’s Take a Peek at NIDILRR’s Outcome Domains: Health and Function