Ba.App.Sc(OT).
Natalie Dickson is an occupational therapist with a wealth of clinical experience, including specialist roles in seating and powered mobility, residential aged care, manual handling and more recently community OT.
In the residential aged care environment, supporting powered mobility for older adults to maintain independence includes the use of assessment, seating supports, adaptation of control options, training, staff support and skills monitoring. Providing mobility options for previously immobile residents enables them to achieve goals they hadn’t thought possible, and reaffirms the value of the powered wheelchair as a “life changing” assistive technology.
The PoMoDARS project began in 2019, when an opportunity arose to begin a Master of Health (by research) supervised by Professor Unsworth and Dr. Gohil, at Federation University’s Institute of Health and Wellbeing. The PoMoDARS was developed in partial fulfilment of this degree, within the study titled Assessment of powered mobility device use among older Australians in residential aged care facilities.
The study has three parts,
- An audit of all powered mobility device use related incidents and injuries across an organisation with 33 facilities over 12 months.
- Comparison of existing powered mobility device assessment tools against the COSMIN checklist, followed by development of a new PMD screening tool
- Initial validation of the new PMD screening tool known as Powered Mobility Device Residential Screen (PoMoDARS)
Publications to support the development of the PoMoDARS are in development and citations will be included on this website when available.
PoMoDARS 