Beach fun awaits for Bundy kids
CQUniversity research project, The Universal Beach Accessibility Hub (U‐BEACH), is about to make a splash like never before with a share in $400,000 of grant funding.
U-Beach will receive $19,991 as part of the inaugural GenQ Health and Wellbeing Queensland Grants Program, which will be used to support children and youth with disability in the Bundaberg region.
Led by CQU neurological physiotherapy and research higher degree candidate, Sasha Job under the supervision of Dr Steven Obst and Dr Luke Heales, the U-Beach initiative has been successful in helping to break down the barriers of beach access for people living with disability or mobility limitations.
Ms Job said this additional funding will assist in expanding U-Beach events with tailored participation and resources for a younger demographic.
“We hosted our first CQUniversity U-Beach Community Beach Day event earlier this year which was attended by more than 250 individuals – many of whom have not had the physical, technical or social support to access the beach for many years.
“With this additional funding, we will need be able to organise an additional two U-BEACH Community Beach Days in 2024 with a focus on improving children and youth participation in physical activity through beach-based play,” she explained.
“The events will involve a range of beach-based activities like walking, swimming, cricket, soccer, sandcastle building, flying kites, and balance and coordination games.”
The Beach Day events will provide specialised infrastructure including a beach path to support wheelchairs and walking frames and sand and ocean friendly wheelchairs to facilitate the beach-based experiences.
“We know from our research that some challenges people face include moving through the soft sand and lack of mobility equipment whilst other challenges relate to a lack of assistance and training,” explained Ms Job.
“To address these barriers, we will also provide capacity-building training will be provided to local organisations, focusing on safe beach mobility aid use and manual handling.”
Health and Wellbeing Queensland Chief Executive Officer Dr Robyn Littlewood said creating a generational shift was key to helping Queensland’s children and young people live healthier more active lives.
“New research shows that a child born in the decade from 2023 may have a shorter life expectancy than their parents – we need to reverse this trend,” she said.
“These Community Grants are just one of the steps we’re taking to deliver our GenQ vision so that children born today experience better health outcomes than the generations of Queenslanders before them.
'These grants will help make healthy happen faster for our state by driving innovation across key areas that have a huge impact on our health and wellbeing, and most importantly by supporting communities bring the ideas to life that will be most beneficial – because they know their own communities better than anyone.”
Transcript
We are here at Beach day out, so it's an all-inclusive beach day where we've got accessible mats and beach equipment so everyone can enjoy the beach
In Bundaberg this is our first ever event so we're pretty excited. It's been a few years in the making to get the equipment to build up our networks for our access Hub and so it's our first day in Bundaberg ever.
I cried a lot this morning just to see people freely coming onto the beach. The very first person to walk down the mat did so just with a little bit of support purely because the mat was here. She said she has MS and it's been a number of years, many years, since she's been to the beach and she used to swim every day and she was just overwhelmed with joy which just made me so proud of our community that we can just bring this joy to people's life and share the magic of the beach
I loved it I had two supporters. Scott from um surf Lifesavers and they do a fabulous job nine to five seven days a week along the coast here. I love it and talking to him gave me the opportunity to figure out how I might be able to do it at Kelly's Beach which is closer to my place
Clara from from CQU physios crew um helped me into the water and it was refreshing and I just had to get down. I had some fear but I knew I had support so I got on my knees and and I got wet up to my sort of neck on waves and yeah it was refreshing, cool, liberating, freeing all of it.
You know everything is a case of being brave enough or feeling brave enough to try these things two years ago I went to Elliot heads took my poodle midwinter and got stuck in a quicksand hole and I haven't been back since. About five years ago I went to Archie's Beach and fell and had to crawl up to a post to get myself off and that that was about five years ago so it's been a long time and I used to love the salt water.
So we know that in our region, around one in five people have disability and fifty percent of those people have told us they can't access the beach we definitely have surveyed our community to understand what the the challenges they face are and we've really looked at solutions to overcome the challenges that you know people with disability have told us exist here so I'm hoping that anyone who wants to access the beach can do so.
Some of the key challenges people face are moving through the soft sand and a lack of Mobility equipment. Another challenge people have in getting to the beach is
they sometimes don't have the support required because of these needs for equipment.
So we've got CQUPhysio and OT students volunteering their time to assist with hoist transfers and transfers to the equipment and helping people just engage in the activities on the beach. The key people involved in organising the event is CQUniversity Physiotherapy and occupational therapy on the Bundaberg campus. We've got ILS, we've got regional health and Mobility, we've got rise up support Partners we've got rotary popping on our sausage Sizzle today, we've also had some support from Queensland computers for a fundraising raffle to get the community a floating wheelchair and we've also got some support from Council.
