New Jersey Hospital Receives Grant To Study How To Prevent Injuries For People With Disabilities

Making life easier for vulnerable people is important. Especially right now, it’s critical to ensure that vulnerable people, especially people with disabilities, have access to proper information.

A new grant awarded to Children’s Specialized Hospital, in New Brunswick, will fund an 18th-month program. This program will focus on providing safety education and injury prevention throughout their life spans. People with disabilities have an increased risk of injury, so a program like this could improve quality of life.

How Can New Jersey Help To Prevent Injury For People With Disabilities?

Ensuring that people with disabilities have access to safety programs and education to prevent injuries is important. Because people with disabilities are at higher-risk, this could be a life-changing program.

This grant award, awarded to Children’s Specialized Hospital by the New Jersey Department of Human Services Division of Disability Services. This grant comes from their Inclusive Healthy Communities (IHC) Grant Program. This program works to “provide funding to communities and organizations in New Jersey to promote inclusive services that support the health and well-being of individuals with disabilities in the communities where they live.”

Adrienne Robertiello, Special Health Educator, Children’s Specialized Hospital, spoke on this grant award:

In partnership with disability self-advocates, safety experts, municipalities, agencies, organizations, caregivers, and health care providers, we’re creating a one-stop accessible location for functional and developmentally appropriate safety and injury prevention resources. We’ll also be making these resources available in multiple formats and outlets to address different learning styles, sensory issues, cognitive abilities, and accessibility needs.”

This program will create critical resources to help individuals will disabilities to navigate injury prevention and personal safety. The program will focus on Union County in New Jersey, though they hope to expand. More specifically, within Union County, the program will focus on Elizabeth and Plainfield.

Because individuals with disabilities may struggle with common safety resources, accessible resources are needed. These resources will be created with different-learning styles, cognitive ability, and accessibility in mind.

Accessible Programs Can Help Individuals To Help Themselves

How is this program unique?

This program’s main focus is helping people with disabilities to help improve their own quality of life. While other programs may focus on caregivers, this is focused on adaption to the individuals who are struggling. The resources will be inclusive, and accessible, and targeted.

Michael Dribbon, Ph.D., Vice President of Business Development says these resources will be impactful:

Safety education has a significant impact on health outcomes, and for people with disabilities, common safety information and resources may not be understandable or useful. It is our responsibility to break down complex safety concepts to empower those with disabilities to take control of their safety by eliminating unnecessary risks and reducing unintentional injuries. This grant enables us to broaden our reach in this space and ensure that these necessary resources are available to any individual who needs them.”

In addition to just adapting other safety resources, the team will work to identify and mitigate risks for people with disabilities in New Jersey. The metrics for this program are:

• The creation of an accessible safety resource depository
• The number of resources and safety curricula created or adapted
• The number of people receiving education
• Change in pre- and post-training measures of safety knowledge and confidence
• Usage of safety behaviors

Programs like this are incredibly important to improving quality of life. Funding for these programs can be critical. That’s why at GrantWatch we have grant categories to help our subscribers to navigate everything. We have an entire category for disability-related programming, for nonprofits, and other organizations. Feel free to reach out to our team with any questions you may have!