AT Outcomes and Impact – A Global Grand Challenge

What is the GAATO AT Outcomes and Impact Grand Challenge project?

Leading up to the WHO-UNICEF Global Report on Assistive Technology, the Global Alliance of Assistive Technology Organisations (GAATO) invited stakeholders from around the world to share views on AT Outcomes and Impacts through a Grand Challenge process.

We aimed to identify and clarify the set of current challenges that needed to be addressed to successfully measure assistive technology outcomes and impact at the individual, community, local, national, and global level.

Today at GAATO along with WHO-UNICEF, we have launched our own report on our Global Consultation findings. Several GAATO Board members are contributing authors in the WHO-UNICEF report and many of them have also led regional consultations for this GAATO Grand Challenge.

In addition to the main findings the Grand Challenges research team, led by Dr. Emma Smith and Dr. Natasha Layton, a new model has been designed based on the data collected, to describe the shortlist of 6 Grand Challenges in AT outcomes and impacts. The model is called the GAATO Outcomes and Impact Model - ‘Drive the Change’, which identify the challenges of, measuring need, documenting inputs, sharing data and informing policy.

GAATO Outcomes and Impact Model - ‘Drive the Change’

To read the full report and findings, including the longlist of the report data, you can click on the image below.

The GAATO Board would like to thank the hundreds of global participants for their time and enthusiasm in taking part in this Global Consultation and also to the project team, who have worked tirelessly on this project for well over a year, in order to produce this groundbreaking work in AT.

A special thanks go to GAATO Board Member Dr. Natasha Layton from ARATA based at Monash University in Australia and Dr. Emma Smith from Maynooth University Ireland, for leading this project and documenting the results. We hope that you enjoy reading the report and we look forward to connecting with you on future GAATO projects.