Dr Jackie McRae

Jackie McRae is a clinical academic Speech and Language Therapist with 30 years’ experience working with adults with complex dysphagia in critical care. After 10 years of working in a specialist spinal injury unit, she undertook a PhD focused on the clinical management of dysphagia in cervical spinal cord injury. She has published and presented her work at national and international conferences to promote collaborative team working. Jackie is a professional advisor, research champion and lead author for national position papers. She supervises and mentors healthcare professionals undertaking their own research journeys. She represents patients who have no voice.

Jackie shares her experiences from the conference.

I am very grateful to SRI for funding my virtual attendance at ISCOS 2022. The virtual ISCOS platform was a great alternative way to link up for live presentations and posters. I was delighted to use the platform to chat to other attendees and linked up with a physiotherapist in Nepal and a researcher in Switzerland. We have exchanged emails for further discussions and potential collaborations.

ISCOS is an opportunity to find out about SCI research activity from around the world. Mine is a very specialist area (speech and swallowing impairments post-SCI) so hearing about similar research helps our planning for future studies. Several colleagues attended in-person and we have discussed our combined insights post-ISCOS. We are preparing our next ISCOS submission and intend to attend Edinburgh 2023 as a whole team.

The highlight was receiving the Hans Frankel Early Career Scholar Award for my poster on oropharyngeal dysphagia in SCI, which puts this area of research on the map. Thank you SRI.