Faizan Jameel Kanzada

Faizan Jameel Kanzada (Group lead) and Ahmad Zamir bin Che Daud

Mr Faizan Jameel is a Pakistani occupational therapist who is currently doing a Master in Health Sciences (Occupational Therapy) at Universiti Teknologi MARA under the supervision of Dr Ahmad Zamir. Mr Faizan Jameel is currently investigating functioning and quality of life among people with spinal cord injury (SCI) in Pakistan and Malaysia. He is working at the Sindh Institute of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation and serves people with SCI regularly. Dr Ahmad Zamir Che Daud is an occupational therapist by background and a senior lecturer at the Centre for Occupational Therapy Studies, Faculty of Health Sciences, Universiti Teknologi Mara, Malaysia. He has a great interest in upper limb rehabilitation for people with SCI.

Faizan (left) and Ahmad (right) share their experiences from the conference.

First and foremost, we would like to thank the International Spinal Injury Society for the SRI collaboration grant, which allowed us to participate in the 61st ISCoS Annual Scientific Meeting from 15th -18th September 2022. Initially, we would like to join the meeting in person, but we decided to participate virtually due to the COVID-19 situation in Malaysia and Pakistan was not so good. We thought it would be hard to participate virtually, but the ISCOS team did an excellent job by providing an easy-to-navigate platform. Thus, we could easily join the sessions during the meeting. It was a pleasant experience to participate in the meeting and get to know prominent scholars in the Spinal cord injury field. During the meeting, we used the networking tab to connect with researchers from other countries who have similar research interests such as Bangladesh, the United Kingdom and Australia. The tab functions like a chat box where we would know who is online or not for networking purposes.

The session that captured our interest a lot was sexual rehabilitation. In our occupational therapy practice, we did not tackle sexual issues as it is taboo in Malaysian and Pakistani culture. The session taught us how to approach and tackle if our clients raise sexual issues as part of their concerns. Besides, the meeting allowed us to share and disseminate the findings of our study on participation issues among clients with spinal cord injury in Pakistan and Malaysia. We had an opportunity to present the poster during the meeting, and we plan to go for an oral presentation at the next ISCoS meeting. Again, we would like to thank the International Spinal Cord Injury Society for the opportunity and look forward to joining the next ISCoS meeting in person.