Hello, and welcome to Transformative Occupation. This is the weekly podcast from the School of Occupational Therapy in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Western University. The date is Wednesday, August 13th, 2025. For this episode, we're bringing you three updates from the school.

First up, a look at some ongoing work from our faculty. We’re going to look at the question: what does research say about homelessness as a disability rights issue? Dr. Carrie Anne Marshall is leading a project that takes a critical disability lens to this topic. The team is conducting a scoping review, which involves a large-scale search across multiple academic databases to map out the existing literature. The aim is to identify the structural problems, like a lack of access to suitable housing or a liveable income, that contribute to homelessness for disabled people. By presenting homelessness as a disability rights issue, the research is intended to provide evidence for policymakers to create changes that address these inequities for unhoused disabled persons.

Next, we turn to a project that asks: what keeps older adults with vision loss from their communities, beyond physical obstacles? Drs. Colleen McGrath, Carri Hand, and Debbie Laliberte Rudman are examining this question. Their work looks at how older adults with age-related vision loss, from conditions like macular degeneration or glaucoma, can experience reduced capacity to engage with their surroundings. The research uses a critical ethnographic approach, which involved forming a collective of older adults with vision loss, service providers, policymakers, and academics. Through a series of qualitative interviews, the study seeks to identify not just the physical, but also the political, social, and pragmatic barriers that limit community mobility and can lead to social isolation.

And for our last update, we're shifting focus to the other end of the lifespan to ask, do movement guidelines for young children work for those with developmental disabilities? This question is central to a study by Drs. Liliana Alvarez and Patricia Tucker. They explored how occupational therapists perceive the Canadian 24-Hour Movement Guidelines when working with preschool-aged children who have developmental disabilities. The research was based on a series of virtual interviews with eleven therapists from across Canada. A key finding is that while therapists see the value in the guidelines and are motivated to use them, they also report that the recommendations can be too rigid for their clients. This work points to a need for additional resources and training to help OTs better tailor the guidelines to the individual needs of the children they work with.

And that brings us to the end of our updates for this week.

We've heard about three distinct areas of work today: one that reframes homelessness as an issue of disability rights, another that identifies the non-physical barriers to community access for older adults with vision loss, and a third that assesses how movement guidelines can be applied to children with developmental disabilities.

What runs through each of these projects is a look at the relationship between a person and their environment. Whether that environment is defined by housing policy, community structure, or public health recommendations, this work questions how well our established systems serve the individuals within them.

Thank you for listening to Transformative Occupation.