2025 ANZSCoS Grant Winner Update
10th October 2025
It is common for people with cervical spinal cord injury (SCI) to experience Obstructive Sleep Apnoea (OSA). This can often go undiagnosed, and people with SCI who live in rural areas find it hard to get an assessment and receive management for this sleep disorder.
The NSW Spinal Outreach Service and Rural Spinal Cord Injury Service, are implementing a new process to screen for OSA, using a cost effective accessible device, the Nonin Wrist Ox, to help make it easier for people with SCI in rural areas to be assessed for OSA and followed up in their local area. Lyndall Kate, Senior Physiotherapist NSW Spinal Outreach Service was awarded the 2023 ANZSCoS Grant to evaluate this new model.
Lyndall Kate, Senior Physiotherapist NSW Spinal Outreach Service
Lyndall reports, ‘we’re working on developing a pathway for those people who can’t access a respiratory specialist in their area by providing information they can take to their [local doctor] to help prescribe a CPAP or BiPAP, and we can do the follow up remotely’.
Anecdotally Lyndall suggests there are some great outcomes, however, to get a better understanding how this new model is working, Lyndall and her team are interviewing the clinicians involved in implementation of this new screening process, including the NSW Rural SCI Co-ordinators, NSW Spinal Outreach Service Physiotherapists and the Spinal Staff Specialist, to explore the feasibility of this new model. By understanding what the barriers and enablers are to this new practice, a sustainable program for the future can be created.
Screening Process
‘We don’t have a clear picture yet, but the pieces of the puzzle are coming together’, and Lyndall and her team are confident that soon people with SCI who live in rural areas will no longer be so disadvantaged when it comes to screening and assessing for OSA in regional, rural and remote NSW.
Results of this study should be available by the end of this year.
