Seminar: Michelle Shannon
On Friday, 9th September, we hosted a seminar by Ms. Michelle Shannon titled: "Selecting a physical environment design feature to examine for impact on people with stroke: the hospital patient room."
Michelle Shannon is a neurological physiotherapist (adults) who submitted her Ph.D. in June 2022. Her Ph.D. was supervised by Prof. Julie Bernhardt, Prof. Marcus White, Prof Alan Pert, and Prof. Marie Elf. Recently, she joined Dr. Nadine Andrew's group on Peninsula Health working on the "Comprehensive Care Project" as a project officer, and also joined Prof. Natasha Lannin's group as a Research Physiotherapist working on a 'Falls after Stroke' clinical trial at Alfred Health in Melbourne.
In the NOVELL seminar, Michelle talked about her Ph.D. journey in architecture and neuroscience. In her Ph.D., she explored the indoor hospital environment and its effect on people with brain injuries, especially stroke survivors. She used reviews, an observational study, and a virtual reality factorial study to explore how the physical design of hospitals might impact adults with brain injury. Her Ph.D. uniquely included the involvement of stroke participants in a virtual reality study.
Also, she described some difficulties with defining and categorizing physical design attributes of hospital patient rooms. She talked about how she chose ‘patient room’ as a variable to work on deeply. She described her procedure in running a systematic review on comparing single and multi-patient rooms and their effects on neurological and older person inpatient populations, titled" "Bringing the single versus multi-patient room debate to vulnerable patient populations: a systematic review of the impact of room types on hospitalized older people and people with neurological disorders." The review questions were about how single-room physical environmental characteristics differ from multi-patient physical environmental characteristics. And also, what are the effects of single rooms compared with multi-patient room types on hospitalised neurological and older patients, staff, and families? Michelle described the review methodology, search strategy, assessment methods, findings, thematic synthesis, and her learnings from the systematic review to proceed with her Ph.D. Click here to read this review paper.
She concluded her talk with an overview of her Ph.D. variables, methodology, and experimental setups. The seminar finished with a Q&A session.
Michelle’s ORCID ID is 0000-0002-6805-078X.