Authors: Lauren Kane, Sharon Adedapo, Alessia Palladino & Matthew McKenna
For more than half a decade now, the Ideas in ALL Blog has provided a platform within Maynooth University (MU) and the Assisting Living and Learning (ALL) Institute for discussing, reflecting upon and drawing public attention to interdisciplinary academic research on areas such as health, public health, wellbeing, accessibility, participation and equality. During this time, we have solicited and published a wealth of insightful contributions from researchers, practitioners, advocates, students and people with disabilities writing from the perspective of lived experience. Our contributing authors hail from a hugely diverse array of professional and personal backgrounds, reflecting the many social, legal, technological, psychological, structural and idiosyncratically individual variables that shape participation in society across the life course. Accordingly, five months on from our hugely successful December 2025 Winter Symposium celebrating 5 years of the Ideas in ALL Blog, we are delighted to be holding our first ever Spring Symposium on Health. The symposium explores health and wellbeing from a varied range of perspectives, embodying the interdisciplinary mission of the ALL Institute and the broader goals of MU’s Health and Wellbeing Research Beacon.
Taken together, the articles featured in this symposium reveal that health extends far beyond clinical care or healthcare systems alone. Instead, they show how health is intrinsically interdisciplinary through its connections with accessibility, participation, education, communication, rights and inclusion. These blogposts draw attention to the fact that wellbeing depends not only on the provision of appropriate healthcare, but also on the environments, social structures and systems through which people live their lives each day. In these articles, a common vision is evident; the importance of empowering people and their communities as active agents in developing systems that directly affect them. As such, several of our symposium publications place lived experience at the forefront of discussions on health, participation and accessibility.
In the contribution from the ERC PatentsInHumans team, Professor Aisling McMahon, Dr Aislinn Fanning, Sharon Adedapo and Lauren Kane explore the structures and systems that shape access to healthcare and patient wellbeing while reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of the symposium itself through an insightful discussion covering law, health, policy, lived experience and ethics. They reveal the complex relationship between intellectual property law, healthcare systems and patient wellbeing by examining important issues such as access to patented medicines and the ethical implications of healthcare innovation. This article shows how laws and policy frameworks can yield substantial ramifications for access to healthcare and public wellbeing.
Longtime blog contributor and former editor, Dr Hannah Casey, writes about Supported Decision Making (SDM) and the iDecIDe project (Co-Creation of Accessible Resources on Assisted Decision-Making for Adults with Intellectual Disabilities and their Decision-Making Supporters) on which she is currently working as a Post-Doctoral Researcher. Her article discusses the need to ensure that people with intellectual disabilities are included in conversations on health, wellbeing and policymaking in a meaningful way. To this end, Hannah explains that SDM is presented as a critically important part of public health that is directly linked to the dignity, independence and inclusion of the individual in society. By emphasising co-design and collaboration, this project highlights the necessity for ensuring that people are given proper support to make their own decisions about their lives and wellbeing.
In his article, Professor Edward Dove considers paternalistic aspects of modern care delivery and restrictions on access to health records, threatening efforts to move toward a patient-centred healthcare model that respects the right of autonomy. He provides an insightful discussion on the uneasy relationship between legal and ethical questions concerning privacy and the right of individual persons to access information regarding their own health and wellbeing. In this context, his blogpost asks a very important question, “is it right to restrict access to one’s health records?”, and explains that it is high-time to reflect this matter and the complex legal and ethical questions involved, and consider how access to one’s health records can be facilitated in a patient-centred and autonomy-promoting manner.
Joan Alaboson’s contribution on health disinformation and misinformation, a prolific phenomenon in the digital age, and peer support within chronic illness communities, explores the increasingly complex relationship between health-related communication, social media, trust and wellbeing. Her article highlights the role that peer support can play for individuals living with chronic illness, as well as the increasing dangers posed by misinformation and disinformation. She also discusses the emotional and relational dimensions of wellbeing and healthcare, especially where people feel unheard, unsupported or isolated from healthcare systems. Her blogpost draws attention to the growing need for accessible, trustworthy and people-centred public health communications.
Tara Gallagher, in her blogpost on understanding neurodiversity in higher education, discusses an open resource toolkit designed to support staff, students and anyone interested in learning about neurodiversity in higher education. She emphasises the necessity of moving beyond medicalised impressions of neurodiversity as an individual deficit that requires fixing and explains that natural individual variations should instead be seen as valuable contributions to society. Her article stresses that neurodivergent students are experts by experience and that their input is essential in order to create more accessible and supportive higher education environments. This project is strongly aligned with the ideals of user-led involvement, inclusion and participation, comprising core elements of the ALL Institute’s mission.
The next blogpost, by Holly Peters McGrath, gives rise to numerous questions regarding the availability of endometriosis healthcare in Ireland, among which the issues of patient experience and trust which feature strongly in this vein. This article provides a personal and policy-informed insight into the stark realities of delayed diagnosis and other barriers to treatment, and the wider social and emotional impacts of chronic illness. Holly emphasises the importance of patient-centred approaches to healthcare provision as well as the need for rigorous scrutiny and continued implementation work while acknowledging the significance of Ireland’s new national framework for endometriosis care.
In each blogpost contribution discussed above, there is a universal recognition that inclusion and participation are central to effective public health systems. They emphasise the importance of listening to the perspectives and lived experiences of those who are recipients of health systems, policies and services, and valuing their input. In this way, our symposium echoes the priorities of MU’s Health and Wellbeing Research Beacon and the mission of the ALL Institute by showcasing just some of the interdisciplinary, collaborative and socially engaged research projects that are taking place therein. The symposium embodies these values by demonstrating some of the individual and collaborative interagency efforts undertaken by ALL researchers and networks to ensure that all people have the opportunity and supports to participate fully in society across the life course.
As always, the Editorial Team is deeply grateful to all our invaluable contributors for their work, time, insights and efforts, to feature their projects, as well as the research underway in ALL, in our Public Health Symposium. Their input reinforces the ethos of interdisciplinarity at the heart of the ALL Institute and the Ideas in ALL Blog as we strive to grow our academic research networks, maximise our impact, and foster wider public and interorganisational engagement with matters of communal health, wellbeing and inclusion. We warmly invite you to engage with the symposium and enjoy reading about, and reflecting upon, these highly topical discussions and research efforts to advance public health, participation and lived experience.
Thank you!
