On Friday, June 6, 2025, The University of Queensland (UQ) hosted the Disability Health Community Roundtable in Toowoomba, bringing together people with disabilities, their families, carers, and community allies to help shape the future of disability and health research in rural Queensland.
In this World Cafe-style event, facilitators and table hosts with lived experience (including RECOVER CAG member Jason Driscoll) led small group discussions. The UQ researchers took on the role of scribes, listening, learning, and writing pages of notes.
The very talented artist Rachel Apelt created a live visual summary of the energetic debate and raw, honest discussions around:
- Building inclusive, healthy and active communities
- Increasing access to services and looking after our workforce, including workers with a disability
- Coordinating care and navigating the system
- Co-designing care that is person-centred and compassionate
The standout messages included:
- Awareness isn't enough - carers, clinicians, researchers and community members need experiential learning opportunities to build empathy, respect, and competency in disability inclusion
- Telehealth coverage is still poor in rural and regional Queensland and the services offered need to be expanded.
- Services are hard to navigate with little coordination between health and disability
- Consumers want health hubs, aimed at enhancing connection and health
- Co-design should integrate local wisdom and community wisdom
Download a PDF of the posters below with a text transcript (PDF, 1.7 MB)
Follow-up - Disability Research Workshop
On Thursday, July 17, 2025, over 100 UQ academics gathered at the Disability Research Workshop to build on these ideas and collaborate on developing new projects aimed at creating change in rural and regional disability health.
Disability health community member Michelle Rogers shared her perspectives on the workshop:
We got to bring back all of the ideas from the Toowoomba workshop, and I felt like that was such a huge responsibility, we were speaking for so many people. There's so many people here, and I feel heard and like they really want to make stuff happen - there's facilities, there's funding, there's systems. And so it wasn't just to have a chat and walk away. What we did in Toowoomba is going to make a difference.
