Symposium

Health, human rights and development – Symposium – 6th October 2015 

On the 6th October SDHI hosted a Symposium on health, human rights and development, which saw more than 40 people attending, including academics representing a variety of disciplines, fore mostly social and health sciences from Dundee, St Andrews and Edinburgh and health professionals. At the moment we are in the process of summarising the information from that day and will post updates shortly. There was clearly an ‘appetite’ to continue the conversation on the topic of health and human rights, and SDHI will organise follow-on activities in this area shortly. In a next step we will engage with NGOs and form further discussion groups. Questions addressed in the symposium revolved around how the university can become more engaged with human rights concerns in its curricula, outreach and research activities as well as in its internal operations.
SDHI Mini Symposium

The SDHI Mini-Symposium “Understanding and promoting physical activity of people with physical disabilities” was held 30 April, 2012 at the University of Dundee and featured six presentations on the topics of barriers, facilitators, psychosocial, and environmental factors in physical activity engagement, and the role of technology to motivate and sustain physical activity behaviour in people with physical disabilities. Several key themes emerged from the presentations and subsequent discussion period: 1) Discussion of the role of rehabilitation professionals in promoting long-term community-based and home-based physical activity behaviour beyond their clinical care duties; 2) Challenging the assumption that physical activity needs to be at a vigorous level to be beneficial; 3) Examination of internal (motivation, self-efficacy) and external (built and social environment) barriers to physical activity participation within the context of personal and environmental factors; 4) Exploration of individualised tailored approaches for physical activity promotion to address these barriers; 5) Consideration of technology as a way of initiating and sustaining long-term physical activity behaviours in youth and adults with physical disabilities. Presenters represented three universities in Scotland (Universities of Dundee and St Andrews, University of Glasgow) and two in the United States (University of Illinois at Chicago; Washington University in St Louis, Missouri). Other participants from various rehabilitation teams and health boards in the NHS, the Centre for Medical Education at the University of Dundee and the Free University of Brussels in Belgium joined the discussions. A successful ‘experiment’ was the web link to presenters and participants in the United States and Belgium who joined remotely.