Translating research into practice: Academia and disability services working together

A productive and collaborative partnership between academia and disability organisations can be developed. However, it requires a substantial amount of work by both sides. It cannot survive on goodwill of one or two people alone; it will only work if significant numbers of people from both sides are truly committed and perceive that there are genuine benefits out of the relationship. If the relationship is one-sided in either direction, it simply will not survive beyond the short-term. One key learning for the disability organisation was that not all University departments are created equal. Potential partnerships were explored with three different faculties before the current positive relationship with the School of Rural Medicine was established. It was also found that getting several disability industry partners to collaborate was feasible, if complicated. This mechanism overcome the problem of limited funding to different individual organisations. The approach resulted in a two-state multiple organisation research proposal being submitted to the Australian Research Council with potential benefits for all disability providers nation-wide.