Tebbutt, Emma

Emma has been a technical officer at the World Health Organization (WHO) since 2015, working on the Global Cooperation on Assistive Technology (GATE). Her role includes project coordination of a new WHO training package which will give community-level personnel the knowledge and skills to provide a range of basic assistive devices. Emma is also coordinating the development of the WHO Wheelchair Service Training of Trainers Package, which will complement the existing series of WHO Wheelchair Service Training Packages. She recently co-authored an article in the journal Globalisation and Health, which presents an overview of GATE and the need for universal access to assistive devices in order to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals: https://globalizationandhealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12992-016-0220-6 

Emma qualified as a physiotherapist in the United Kingdom in 1999. She has a clinical background in rehabilitation, primarily with older adults, amputees, and people with neurological conditions. She completed an MSc in acupuncture in 2006 and went on to teach acupuncture to physiotherapists up to Masters level. This sparked an interest in training and she went on to work for a non-governmental organisation in South India; developing training materials for a mid-level rehabilitation worker programme; and evaluating graduate skills and impact on service users.

In the Focus on: Rehabilitation (SEM-06) seminar, Emma is speaking on behalf of Dr Alarcos Cieza Moreno, coordinator of WHO's unit on Blindness and Deafness Prevention, Disability and Rehabilitation.