Quadraplegic on research staff

Press, 21 January 1982, Page 13

Quadraplegic on research staff

By

JOHN GOULTER

At the spinal unit of the St John of God Hospital at Halswell. Ruth Jackson puts in four days a week as a technical assistant for the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries. She has had the job for the last 10 years. Five years before that a car accident left her severely paralysed and confined to a wheelchair. She retained just some movement in her arms. Ruth works as a member of the Ministry’s pest section, and her main job is identifying and analysing insects that are brought to her from traps out in the field. At present the group is looking at the damage caused by insects in sugar beet crops. Each week about 70 samples of insects are collected from ground and flight traps at the Templeton research farm, and brought to Ruth at the hospital. She feels she is lucky to have the job. She got it when a staff member at the spinal unit was concerned about patients “sitting around wasting their lives" and approached her husband, a scientist with M.A.F.. to see

if there might be an opportunity there. The Ministry has never had a quadraplegic on the research staff, and Ruth, who was 19 when she had her accident, had never worked in research. But she was taken on for a trial, and it worked.

“When she came to us we didn't know what to expect, and I think because we expected a lot, she was soon doing things she might not have done otherwise,'’ says Mrs Joan Pearson, a technical officer with the Ministry's research division which has its local offices on the campus of Lincoln College.

"I’ve certainly always had Joan and the others giving me the push along,” Ruth agrees. “And I suppose it has meant that I’ve done things which some of the others at the spinal unit are not enthused to do.” For a start she went to the

office to work, but this had some drawbacks — most of them small annoyances which can beset a person with handicaps who enters the workforce. If she was alone in the office and dropped a pencil, it would have to stay there until someone came along to pick it up. A small but trying problem when most of Ruth's colleagues spent long times out in the field.

So for the last few years Ruth has found it easier to work from her room at the hospital. A Ministry technician, Mr Graeme Stringer, has designed and built a specialised table which allows her to handle-the equipment necessary for her insect work. A microscope has been adapted to make for easier handling, and elsewhere on the table a low pressure water jet has been fitted to flush away insect samples after Ruth has finished work on them.

Occasionally, Ruth visits trial sites out in the field, so that she can see the work as a whole.

"I can work at my pace this way," she says. And with co-operation from the hospital staff — a nurse loosens the screw tops of sample bottles each morning, for instance — the pace can be considerable. She does not suffer from the interruptions which she would in a busy office.

Like some other workers, disabled and otherwise, she has opted for an 80 per cent workload and pay. This gives her a day off each week for shopping or the parts of the hospital routine which she found difficult to fit in when she worked full time. Ruth's accident was before accident compensation was introduced, and the income has been useful. She has brought a car and learnt to drive it with specially fitted adaptions. She has also had "a couple of trips to Australia," and as she comments, “You can’t do that sort of thing on a benefit."