Practices for promoting a child's best interests in paediatric rehabilitation - Perspectives of professionals and parents.

Practices for promoting a child's best interests in rehabilitation are not sufficiently understood. This study describes the practices from the perspectives of professionals and parents of children with disabilities. We conducted 11 interviews: 5 in focus groups with professionals (n = 27 [69%]), 3 with parents (n = 9 [23%]), and 3 individual interviews of paediatric neurologists (n = 3 [8%]). We used a qualitative approach, which included inductive content analysis, to examine the transcribed interview data. The practices for promoting a child's best interests consisted of collective framing of child-specific rehabilitation, fostering a fulfilling daily life for the child, and ensuring appropriate rehabilitation. This was enhanced by using child-specific practices and comprehensively understanding the child's rehabilitation in everyday life but was hindered by the absence of an established process and guidelines. The results highlighted substantial challenges in collaboration aligned with the child's best interests, enabling the child's active participation, and addressing the individual needs of the child and family. Promoting best interests through family-professional partnerships by using a systemic and ecological approach could guide the rehabilitation process and ensure the child's right to participate.

Knowledge Needs in Rehabilitation: Perspectives of Service Users and Professionals.

Applying rehabilitation research knowledge in practice is challenging due to a gap between scientific knowledge produced by researchers and the needs of practical rehabilitation. This study describes the current and future knowledge needs of rehabilitation research from the perspectives of professionals and service users. We conducted a qualitative study with inductive content analysis from nine focus group interviews with rehabilitation stakeholders. The results show that current knowledge needs are strongly related to the meaningful and inclusive life of service users, the promotion of multi- and interprofessionalism in rehabilitation, and transdisciplinary applied research on rehabilitation. The future knowledge needs were related to the changing needs of rehabilitation and remote rehabilitation based on rapid change in society and digitalisation and on different rehabilitation practices and contexts. The results of the study can be used to enable favorable conditions for reciprocal research, development, and innovation (RDI) activities and research networks in transdisciplinary rehabilitation.

What Makes Participation Meaningful? Using Photo-Elicitation to Interview Children with Disabilities.

AIMS: The purpose of this study was to describe meaningful participation in everyday life from the perspectives of children with disabilities. METHODS: Nine children (5-10 years, mean age 7.2 years, 5 boys, 4 girls) with disabilities participated in individual photo-elicitation interviews. The interview data was transcribed verbatim and analyzed with inductive content analysis. RESULTS: The children's meaningful participation mainly comprised free leisure activities that fostered enjoyment, capability, autonomy and social involvement with family and friends. The children's emotions and physical sensations, opportunities to influence, knowledge about the activity and the participation context, presumptions and previous experiences of the activity and the environment played a vital role in their decisions to participate. CONCLUSION: The meaningful participation facilitated enjoyment and self-determination for the children. Identifying personal and environmental factors supporting or restricting participation from the child's perspective emerges as important in order to provide opportunities for the child's meaningful participation in everyday life. The photo-elicitation interviews demonstrated the potential to act as a tool to identify and explore the children's views about participation in a real-life context.