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Grant success for Dr Sarah Knight and team

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We are excited to share that Healthy Trajectories team member Dr Sarah Knight has been awarded funding by Melbourne Disability Institute as part of their Interdisciplinary Disability Research Seed Funding program 2024.

Sarah’s project focuses on fatigue for children with disability and the project is a collaboration between University of Melbourne, Children’s Hospital at Westmead, Sydney, and the Victorian Paediatric Rehabilitation Service. The project, called ‘Co-designing an evidence-informed, interdisciplinary, transdiagnostic fatigue program with young people with child-onset disabilities and their families’ will support children aged 5-18 years with disabilities and their families. The program they develop will be adaptable and grounded in real-world clinical practices and family experiences. The project will actively involve young people with child-onset disability, their families, and the clinicians and educators who work with them.

The project team explain:

Persistent fatigue is recognised as one of the most frequent, distressing, and challenging symptoms for children with disability, with high prevalence rates (40-80%) across multiple childhood diagnoses, including cerebral palsy, acquired brain injury and cancer. It is characterised by an overwhelming sense of tiredness, lack of energy, and exhaustion. In children with disability, fatigue is often reported as a “less-visible” long-lasting problem that is generally hard to manage due to its complexity and chronicity.

Fatigue greatly affects a child’s ability to participate in school, social and family activities, lowers their quality of life, and is currently insufficiently addressed by Australian rehabilitation services. To date, fatigue has predominantly been treated as a diagnosis-specific issue, yet international research increasingly supports the view that it is best understood as a transdiagnostic symptom, with shared biopsychosocial mechanisms that cut across various conditions, including cerebral palsy, brain injury, and cancer. This paves the way for new, likely more effective, efficient and practical, approaches to fatigue management in paediatric rehabilitation.

Congratulations to Sarah and her team, we look forward to reporting on the findings of this important project.

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