Malcolm Maclachlan
Biographic Data
| ID | 1399396 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Malcolm Maclachlan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Malcolm |
| FAMILY NAME | Maclachlan |
| SIGNATURE | MACLACHLAN M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Trinity College Dublin |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6672-9206 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 70 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 70 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 70 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Exploring challenges experienced by older persons in accessing health services in Malawi
Background: Malawi, like other developing countries, is not prepared to adequately address the health needs of older persons. Objectives: This article explores challenges older persons experience in accessing health care. Method: This article is based on data from two large. Conducted in Blantyre, Phalombe, Dowa and Rumphi Districts, the EquitAble study examined self-reported barriers. The GeoHealthAccess study examined geographical barriers, con…
SHAPES of things to come- medicine control and optimisation
Background: The Smart & Healthy Ageing through People Engaging in Supportive Systems (SHAPES) Innovation Action comprised 36 partners across 14 countries to build, deploy and pilot an EU-standardised open platform integrating a range of technological, organisational, clinical, educational and societal Digital Solutions to support healthy and independent living of older adults at home. Aim: SHAPES explored 7 themes including ‘Medicine control and …
The role of human rights in sport education: A Call Towards a New Curriculum
The role of sport as a contributor to sustainable development and human rights is well established. However, evidence on sports professionals’ understanding of its contribution and their readiness to maximize its impact in this field is insufficient. This study aimed to ascertain sports practitioners’ understanding and application of human rights principles in and through sport and to explore the extent to which individual and contextual factors …
The Kenyan assistive technology ecosystem: A network analysis
BACKGROUND: Assistive technology is central to the realization of the rights of persons with disabilities. However, there remains limited access to assistive technology throughout much of the world, with particularly poor access in lower- and middle-income countries. Evaluating stakeholder engagement in assistive technology networks has been used as a successful strategy to understand and address gaps in the assistive technology ecosystem. OBJECT…
Learning from innovative staff practices that led to virtual disability services using the lens of Complex Adaptive Systems
this paper draws on a complex adaptive systems lens to develop an understanding of the staff practices that sup-ported the development of Virtual Disability services in ireland amid the cOViD-19 pandemic. the study involved twelve interviews with service providers, which were anal-ysed using Reflexive thematic analysis, leading to two over-arching themes. the first theme focuses on the logistics of constructing the response. this includes dynamic…
Relevance of assistive technology and the sustainable development goals to stakeholder organizations in Malawi
Assistive technologies are critical to supporting the participation and engagement of persons with disabilities and others who experience functional difficulties in daily life. Assistive products have been demonstrated to be related to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs); however, no previous research has explored the relationship between assistive technology (AT) and the SDGs from the perspective of stakeholder organisati…
Network analysis of assistive technology stakeholders in Malawi
BACKGROUND: Assistive technologies promote participation and quality of life for people with disabilities and other functional limitations. There is a global call to develop and implement policies to improve access to assistive technologies. In response, a stakeholder led initiative in Malawi is working towards the development of such a policy. OBJECTIVE: The objective of this study was to assess the existing network of stakeholders, and the stre…
Promoting regional coherence and cohesion amidst multiple assistive technology initiatives in Africa
It is time to break away from Western institutionalised biomedical ways of providing ATS in Africa. Africans must develop coherent, cohesive ATS driven by empowered users who build on Africa's strengths and addresses the continents' unique needs
Perceptions on Extending the Use of Technology after the Covid-19 Pandemic Resolves: A Qualitative Study with Older Adults
The COVID-19 pandemic of the last two years has affected the lives of many individuals, especially the most vulnerable and at-risk population groups, e.g., older adults. While social distancing and isolation are shown to be effective at decreasing the transmission of the virus, these actions have also increased loneliness and social isolation. To combat social distancing from family and friends, older adults have turned to technology for help. In…
The Assistive Technology Passport: A Resource for Enhancing Capabilities as a Result of Better Access to Assistive Technology
The value of Assistive Technology in enabling active and equal participation in political, social, economic, and cultural life of people with disabilities, people ageing, and people with chronic conditions is broadly accepted. However, most of the global population who need assistive technology (AT) lack access to it, hence the call for international efforts to improve access to AT. Drawing from the capability approach (CA) developed by Amartya S…
Implementing ‘real’ change: A Bourdieusian take on stakeholder reflections from the United Nations Partnership on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities project in Uruguay
This study aims to illustrate the process of implementing a national disability project targeting structural change facilitated by the United Nations Partnership on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNPRPD), and analysed through the theoretical lens of Pierre Bourdieu. This paper presents qualitative case study findings from interviews with key representatives from the UNPRPD country project in Uruguay in 2019. Participant responses were c…
The coordinates of scaling: Facilitating inclusive innovation
The desire to ensure that the benefits of successful small‐scale social innovation are more widely available has led to a plethora of frameworks that seek to scale such innovations. We review 20 extant frameworks for scaling and distinguished four directions: up (producing changes in laws, policies, institutions or norms), down (resource allocation to support implementation), in (ensuring organizations have the capacity to deliver the type and nu…
Commentary: Challenges and opportunities in autism assessment – a commentary on Kanne and Bishop (2020)
Kanne and Bishop’s (2020) Editorial Perspective ‘ The Autism waitlist crisis and remembering what families need’ offers a strong argument to provide greater access to high‐quality assessments for Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). They note, correctly, that due to increasing numbers of referrals practitioners are under increasing pressure to provide quicker or abbreviated evaluations, that some cases are extremely complex and require considerable ex…
Perspectives on access and usage of assistive technology by people with intellectual disabilities in the Western Cape province of South Africa: Where to from here
With the perspectives of both the providers and users of AT, this study identified priority factors, which could be addressed to improve AT access and use for people with ID in the Western Cape province
Developing Evidence-Based Alternatives to Dual Salary Systems
The United Nation's Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 8.5 aims to “achieve equal pay for work of equal value” globally by 2030. This goal conflicts with a widespread and continuing practice of paying skilled workers from higher-income economies working in lower-income settings more than their host worker counterparts. This brief summarizes research that has found that dual salaries undermine host colleagues' sense of wage justice, work motivatio…
Socio-Demographic Factors Influencing the Use of Assistive Technology among Children with Disabilities in Malawi
This paper aims to address the information gap on the influence of socio-demographic factors on access and utilization of Assistive Technology (AT) among children with disabilities in Malawi. Thus, it contributes towards the realization of the recommendations of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with disabilities and the development of a framework for creating an effective national AT policy. The paper used two statistically matched data…
Exploring equity and inclusion in Malawi’s National Disability Mainstreaming Strategy and Implementation Plan
The development of disability policies and associated implementation strategies requires equitable and inclusive processes that consider input from all stakeholders especially those whose wellbeing depend on such policies. It is pivotal for government and organisations in the process of policy or strategy development and implementation, to involve stakeholders in a virtuous process of co-production - co-implementation - co-evaluation, which may s…
The macropsychology of Covid-19: Psychological governance as pandemic response
Controlling the pandemic has necessitated governments across the world to implement behavior change agenda, through new policies, laws, and public communication strategies. The concept of "psychological governance" has therefore been crucial to curtailing the pandemic. Psychological governance is the application of insights from behavioral and psychological sciences to public policy for the purpose of influencing behavior at the individual, group…
Covid-19 as social disability: The opportunity of social empathy for empowerment
COVID-19 has conferred new experiential knowledge on society and a rare opportunity to better understand the social model of disability and to improve the lives of persons with disabilities. The COVID-19 experience may offer contextual knowledge of the prepandemic lives of persons with disabilities and foster greater social awareness, responsibility and opportunities for change towards a more inclusive society. Information, family and social rela…
Developing inclusive and resilient systems: Covid-19 and assistive technology
Assistive technology is a critical component of maintaining health, wellbeing, and the realization of rights for persons with disabilities. Assistive technologies, and their associated services, are also paramount to ensuring individuals with functional limitations have access to important health and social service information, particularly during a pandemic where they may be at higher risk than the general population. Social isolation and physic…
Death anxiety, self-worth, and exposure to human donor remains: A longitudinal study of Irish medical students
This study aimed to investigate the relationship between death anxiety levels at pre-exposure to human donor remains, post-exposure self-worth, and post-exposure death anxiety levels, among a sample of Irish medical students. A multi-wave prospective study was conducted, using questionnaires administered at six time-points. Path analysis was used to investigate the effect of pre-exposure death anxiety levels and post-exposure self-worth on post-e…
Community-Based Mental Health Intervention Skills: Task Shifting in Low- and Middle-Income Settings
There is a global need to provide human resources for health in low- and middle-income countries. To increase access to care, task shifting has been implemented in community-based rehabilitation (CBR) programs where skills and responsibilities are transferred to local people with shorter and more focused training. Through realist review and synthesis, this research aimed to consolidate the literature when considering (a) what skills CBR workers a…
Globalization and Health: Developing the journal to advance the field
Founded in 2005, Globalization and Health was the first open access global health journal. The journal has since expanded the field, and its influence, with the number of downloaded papers rising 17-fold, to over 4 million. Its ground-breaking papers, leading authors -including a Nobel Prize winner- and an impact factor of 2.25 place it among the top global health journals in the world. To mark the ten years since the journal's founding, we, memb…
Assistive products and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have placed great emphasis on the need for much greater social inclusion, and on making deliberate efforts to reach marginalized groups. People with disabilities are often marginalized through their lack of access to a range of services and opportunities. Assistive products can help people overcome impairments and barriers enabling them to be active, participating and productive members of society. Assisti…
Promoting good policy for leadership and governance of health related rehabilitation: A realist synthesis
BACKGROUND: Good governance may result in strengthened performance of a health system. Coherent policies are essential for good health system governance. The overall aim of this research is to provide the best available scientific evidence on principles of good policy related leadership and governance of health related rehabilitation services in less resourced settings. This research was also conducted to support development of the World Health O…
Returning Strangers: The Children of Malawian Refugees Come 'Home
There has been relatively little research addressing the important issue of how refugees adapt to returning home. The research which has been done, however, suggests that the process of reintegration can be problematic and, at times, seriously distressing to returnees, especially if they are young. The present study investigated young refugees who had ‘returned’ to Malawi (the country of their parents' birth), although none of them had previously…
Adjustment to an Artificial Limb: A Qualitative Perspective
The purpose of this study was to identify factors considered to be important in the adjustment to amputation and the wearing of a prosthetic limb from the perspective of the person who has had a lower limb amputation. Hence, focus group methodology was employed as a means of acquiring perspectives within a population of young adults who had a lower limb amputation. Preliminary thematic analysis revealed that factors such as self-image, social, ph…
An African way of networking around disability
There is a relative paucity of disability-related research emanating from low and middle income countries. We report here on the successes and challenges of AfriNEAD (the African Network on Evidence to Action on Disability), a recently formed network that brings together researchers, activists and other role-players in attempting to develop and support disability-related research in Africa. We introduce the African concept of ubuntu (humanness) a…
Expatriate aid salaries in Malaŵi: A doubly demotivating influence
Perceived barriers to accessing health services among people with disabilities in rural northern Namibia
People living with disabilities (PWD) face unique problems in dealing with conventional healthcare facilities. We investigate the experiences of PWD as they access healthcare facilities in rural Namibia. More specifically, we investigate structural–environmental and process barriers to accessing health facilities. The study relied on semi-structured interviews and purposive sampling. The results showed PWD find it difficult to walk to health cent…
Coping strategies as predictors of psychosocial adaptation in a sample of elderly veterans with acquired lower limb amputations
Outcomes associated with participation in a therapeutic recreation camping programme for children from 15 European countries: Data from the ‘Barretstown Studies
Towards a Global Health Contribution for Critical Health Psychology: Some Comments on Hepworth
The ability of critical health psychology to deliver on its implicit promise to link social and biological processes is compromised by: (1) a morally superior stance of being critical of rather than being critical for other disciplines; (2) insufficient pluralism in its concepts and methods; and (3) unwillingness to engage with more 'distant' disciplines that are salient to its goals; particularly economics, management and law. The global health …
Turning the Ebbing Tide’: Knowledge Flows and Health in Low-income Countries
The macropsychology of Covid-19: Psychological governance as pandemic response
Controlling the pandemic has necessitated governments across the world to implement behavior change agenda, through new policies, laws, and public communication strategies. The concept of "psychological governance" has therefore been crucial to curtailing the pandemic. Psychological governance is the application of insights from behavioral and psychological sciences to public policy for the purpose of influencing behavior at the individual, group…
Death anxiety, self-worth, and exposure to human donor remains: A longitudinal study of Irish medical students
This study aimed to investigate the relationship between death anxiety levels at pre-exposure to human donor remains, post-exposure self-worth, and post-exposure death anxiety levels, among a sample of Irish medical students. A multi-wave prospective study was conducted, using questionnaires administered at six time-points. Path analysis was used to investigate the effect of pre-exposure death anxiety levels and post-exposure self-worth on post-e…
Children's Perspectives of Therapeutic Recreation: Data from the 'Barretstown Studies
Camps offering therapeutic recreation-based programmes seek to provide a positive experience for children with life-threatening illnesses, and their siblings. While such programmes are undoubtedly motivated by the best of intentions, there are very little data available on children's own experiences in them. This article addresses this by investigating children's experiences in The Barretstown Gang Camp in Ireland. A questionnaire was completed b…
Cultivating Pluralism in Health Psychology
Historically health, illness and healing operated through a single medium, or idiom, within relatively culturally encapsulated societies. Our increasingly porous societies now present us with a plethora of cultural explanations for our states of 'being'. Health 'seekers' can now turn to a variety of health 'providers'. The complexities of this situation are illustrated by reviewing research from Africa on cognitive tolerance. In many western soci…
Aids education for youth through active learning: A school-based approach from Malawi
The Assistive Technology Passport: A Resource for Enhancing Capabilities as a Result of Better Access to Assistive Technology
The value of Assistive Technology in enabling active and equal participation in political, social, economic, and cultural life of people with disabilities, people ageing, and people with chronic conditions is broadly accepted. However, most of the global population who need assistive technology (AT) lack access to it, hence the call for international efforts to improve access to AT. Drawing from the capability approach (CA) developed by Amartya S…
Developing inclusive and resilient systems: Covid-19 and assistive technology
Assistive technology is a critical component of maintaining health, wellbeing, and the realization of rights for persons with disabilities. Assistive technologies, and their associated services, are also paramount to ensuring individuals with functional limitations have access to important health and social service information, particularly during a pandemic where they may be at higher risk than the general population. Social isolation and physic…
Organizational Psychology and poverty reduction: Where supply meets demand
Developing a globally responsive Science‐Practitioner‐ Humanist model (Lefkowitz, 2008 ) means articulating professional values (supply) and meeting global demand. The United Nations' Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) seek to halve human poverty by 2015 and how organizations respond to this constitutes a formidable demand on Organizational Psychology. A key process for delivering more effective aid is the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness,…
Knowledge Flow and Capacity Development: An Introduction to the Special Issue
Critical Incidents in emergency relief work
The ethos of technical assistance in emergency relief work has emphasised the importance of recruiting people with appropriate professional and technical skills to work under the difficult circumstances of disasters. The authors used the Critical Incident Technique to assess jobrelated skills that were seen to be crucial for the achievement of the objectives towards which emergency relief personnel were working. Fifteen Irish nurses, working pred…
Pathways to a Psychology for Development: Reconstituting, Restating, Refuting and Realising
Psychology has, at best, only made a modest contribution to efforts aimed at resolving the problems of developing societies. While other disciplines have produced specialisations addressing the difficulties of the world's poorer nations, psychology has failed to do so. It is suggested that psychologists in developing countries lack a framework for applying psychological knowledge to their local settings and conditions. Wepresent a conceptual meth…
From Dissonance to Tolerance: Toward Managing Health in Tropical Cultures
Against a backdrop in which in which psychology is being increasingly criticised for failing to meet the pressing needs of Third World' peoples, we report findings from Malawi relevant to the management of health services in the tropics. Surveys of beliefs regarding malaria, schistosom iasis, epilepsy and psychiatric symptomatology have all revealed a remarkable "tropical tolerance "forboth modern medical and traditional forms of health service: …
Attributions for Admission To Zomba Mental Hospital: Implications for the Development of Mental Health Services in Malawi
Within Malawi, as in many other African countries, a variety of traditional and modern attributions exist regarding the cause of a person's mental disturbance, or their admission to a 'mental' hospital. It is argued that a good mental health service should consider the beliefs of the patients it seeks to serve. Consequently we studied 103 consecutive admissions to Zomba Mental Hospital in order to find out how patients explained their own admissi…
Epidemic Psychological Disturbance in a Malawian Secondary School: A Case Study in Social Change
We describe a case of Epidemic Psychological Disturbance (EPD) involving 110 pupils at a Catholic Girls Secondary School in Malawi. The EPD 'syndrome' included 'outward' behaviours (screaming, continuous laughing, crying loudly, falling down and rolling, violently threatening classmates, speaking gibberish) and 'inward' behaviours (refusing to eat, withdrawal, hallucinating, hypersensitivity to noise, and headache at the base of the skull). These…
Development through educational collaboration: Facilitating social equity
Aids education for youth through active learning: A school-based approach from Malawi
Transactional Analysis of Communication Styles in HIV/Aids Advertisements
Television advertising has been an important medium for health promotion campaigns addressing HIV/AIDS. This study sought to evaluate the 'Grim Reaper' and 'Multiple Beds' advertisements frequently broadcasted throughout Australia. Our model for evaluation was based on a theoretical synthesis of television advertising, transactional analysis (TA) and recall congruence. Eighty-three participants viewed each advertisement and rated which ego state …
Attributions for "Third World" Poverty: Contextual Factors in Australia and Brazil
Western (or "First World') societies continue to be confronted by the ever growing prob lem of "Third World" poverty. Financial donationsfrom "Western "publics are onepos sible contribution to seeking remedies, but these partly depend on donor experience and perceptions, which are likely to be indirect and subject to attributional biases. Exposing such biases may help to correct them. This paper compares attributions for Third World poverty betwe…
Psychology in Developing Countries: Reassessing its Impact
The last global review of the role of psychology in developing countries was edited by Sinha and Holtzman in 1984. This paper evaluates journal publications appearing in the Psychlit database in the decadefollowing Sinha and Holtzman's review, focusing on studies which contain scientific evidence of practical out come. There are three categories of such research, namely, social/organisational, health/welfare, and educational/developmental, with c…
Expatriate aid salaries in Malaŵi: A doubly demotivating influence
Psychological Adjustment and Coping in Adults With Prosthetic Limbs
The potential mediating effects of different coping strategies on the adjustment to living with a prosthetic limb were investigated in 44 adult amputees. Participants completed a questionnaire inquiring about coping, pain, emotional well-being, demographics, and disability-related variables. The coping strategy adopted and the extent of the adjustment to the prosthetic limb varied with age, site of limb loss, and cause of amputation. Furthermore,…
Returning Strangers: The Children of Malawian Refugees Come 'Home
There has been relatively little research addressing the important issue of how refugees adapt to returning home. The research which has been done, however, suggests that the process of reintegration can be problematic and, at times, seriously distressing to returnees, especially if they are young. The present study investigated young refugees who had ‘returned’ to Malawi (the country of their parents' birth), although none of them had previously…
Cultivating Pluralism in Health Psychology
Historically health, illness and healing operated through a single medium, or idiom, within relatively culturally encapsulated societies. Our increasingly porous societies now present us with a plethora of cultural explanations for our states of 'being'. Health 'seekers' can now turn to a variety of health 'providers'. The complexities of this situation are illustrated by reviewing research from Africa on cognitive tolerance. In many western soci…
Critical Incidents in emergency relief work
The ethos of technical assistance in emergency relief work has emphasised the importance of recruiting people with appropriate professional and technical skills to work under the difficult circumstances of disasters. The authors used the Critical Incident Technique to assess jobrelated skills that were seen to be crucial for the achievement of the objectives towards which emergency relief personnel were working. Fifteen Irish nurses, working pred…
Adjustment to an Artificial Limb: A Qualitative Perspective
The purpose of this study was to identify factors considered to be important in the adjustment to amputation and the wearing of a prosthetic limb from the perspective of the person who has had a lower limb amputation. Hence, focus group methodology was employed as a means of acquiring perspectives within a population of young adults who had a lower limb amputation. Preliminary thematic analysis revealed that factors such as self-image, social, ph…
Children's Perspectives of Therapeutic Recreation: Data from the 'Barretstown Studies
Camps offering therapeutic recreation-based programmes seek to provide a positive experience for children with life-threatening illnesses, and their siblings. While such programmes are undoubtedly motivated by the best of intentions, there are very little data available on children's own experiences in them. This article addresses this by investigating children's experiences in The Barretstown Gang Camp in Ireland. A questionnaire was completed b…
Temporal Acculturation and Mental Health in Modern Ireland
Background: Research on geographic acculturation has demonstrated an association between the sort of acculturation strategy adopted by migrants and their mental health status. However, there have been no studies of the relationship between temporal acculturation - attempts to adapt to change within the same society over time - and mental health. Method: We explored the relevance of Berry’s bidimensional framework of acculturation, to perceptions …
Outcomes associated with participation in a therapeutic recreation camping programme for children from 15 European countries: Data from the ‘Barretstown Studies
Embodiment (Health Psychology)
Knowledge Flow and Capacity Development: An Introduction to the Special Issue
Turning the Ebbing Tide’: Knowledge Flows and Health in Low-income Countries
Confirmatory Factor Analysis of the Trinity Inventory of Precursors to Suicide (Tips) and Its Relationship to Hopelessness and Depression
Numerous existing measures assess attitudes toward suicide yet fail to account for contextual factors. The Trinity Inventory of Precursors to Suicide (TIPS) is presented as an alternative, with implications for the development of prevention programs. Having previously reported exploratory analysis of the TIPS; confirmatory factor analysis and predictive validity are examined. Two-hundred-nineteen males and 454 females aged 15 to 19 years (M = 16.…
Transactional Analysis of Aids Prevention Advertising
Germane to the production and use of health education advertisements is their effectiveness. MacLachlan, Carr, Fardell, Maffesoni, and Cunningham (1997) proposed that an HIV/AIDS health education message is more effective when the ego state “hooked” by the advertisement is complementary (parallel) to the ego state experienced during sexual interaction. The aim of this study was to test this model further and, through minor modification of the ori…
Culture and health: A Critical Perspective Towards Global Health
Culture and Health considers the practical implications of working with people from different cultures. It takes an explicitly critical perspective to explore the many fascinating interplays between culture and health, situating them within the broader social contexts in which they arise. Written in an engaging and accessible style, this second edition has been extensively revised and updated, and now includes a chapter on Global Health. It conta…
Towards a Global Health Contribution for Critical Health Psychology: Some Comments on Hepworth
The ability of critical health psychology to deliver on its implicit promise to link social and biological processes is compromised by: (1) a morally superior stance of being critical of rather than being critical for other disciplines; (2) insufficient pluralism in its concepts and methods; and (3) unwillingness to engage with more 'distant' disciplines that are salient to its goals; particularly economics, management and law. The global health …
Political science (46 works) · Psychology (44 works) · Sociology (34 works) · Medicine (30 works) · Public relations (24 works) · Business (21 works) · Psychiatry (19 works) · Economics (18 works) · Social Psychology (18 works) · Economic growth (17 works)